The former displays a series of egg photos with recollections from the artist on the difficulties of bilingualism contrasted with workbook-style handwriting intended to convey a young girl having to learn the differences between words like “lay,” “lies,” “laid,” etc.Īnd while Álvarez Muñoz officially completed the series in 1984, she says now that she looks at the series much like the rest of her work that a sense of completeness is always elusive. Of the entire series, “Enlightenment #4: Which Came First?” and “Ave María Purísima (Enlightenment #8)” are likely the most revered. Álvarez Muñoz began the series in the late ’70s as a means to look back at certain periods of her childhood or, as she put it in an interview with the Smithsonian in 2004, to look “back to fully embrace and explore the form with the knowledge that I had behind me.” Perhaps the most recognizable works on display at “Breaking the Binding” will be Álvarez Muñoz’s foundational “Enlightenment,” a multiyear series of text-and-photo works that wittily explores language barriers and growing up in a dichotomous border city. “There’s an undertone of the dark side in most of the works, but for this one I delved a little more into it.” “It originally had a lot to do with the sexualization of children and women,” recalls Álvarez Muñoz, who worked early in her life as an illustrator in the fashion industry. There, she adjusted the piece to address the serial killings of young women in Juarez, Mexico, a city she was well familiar with having grown up in neighboring El Paso, Texas. However, the piece took on additional meanings when she installed it as “Fibra y Furia: Exploitation is in Vogue” in 1999 at the Irving Art Center in Irving, Texas. ![]() Originally commissioned and exhibited as “Fibra” at the Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 1996, she later expanded the installation in both the execution and in the issues it explored.Īt first, she intended it as a commentary on the marketing tactics of the fashion industry toward children, with designs that include things like lacy diapers and bedazzled booty shorts. Take “Fibra y Furia,” arguably the most evocative and immersive installation at the MCASD exhibition. ![]() All of the more than 35 pieces of art and six installations at the MCASD retrospective have been previously exhibited, but are presented here anew, refashioned by the artist and the curators to present something that’s both historical and timely. She agrees that much of her work is site-specific, but is also quick to point out that it’s also site-dependent. An apt description of Álvarez Muñoz’s approach to her work, especially considering how she continues to revisit and rejigger previous works. She pauses before adding, “Forever, the wonder.”įorever, the wonder.
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