ART REVIEW : Artists Build Shrines to Personal and Cultural Pasts

Artists exploring the fickle, fertile fields of memory navigate not only their own personal history but that of their ancestors, their race and religion. Personal and cultural memory collaborate to tell the tale of each life, to define its structure, values and beliefs.

“Ceremony of Memory,” an exhibition at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove, celebrates the spiritual expressions born of this intersection of personal and cultural pasts. Amalia Mesa-Baines, who was curator of the show for the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, brings together 12 artists of Latino and Caribbean ancestry whose work, according to the show’s catalogue, fuses Catholic, indigenous and African elements.

By working in formats traditionally reserved for expressions of religious faith--altars, shrines, icons, niches, reliquaries--these artists encourage a spiritual reading of their work. They focus meditative attention on even the most mundane elements, bestowing upon them an iconic power.

In his alternately slick and folksy box-shaped shrines, Peter Rodriguez honors such divergent cultural presences as the chile and the souls of the dead. His “Milagros” (Miracles) shrine accentuates the surreal quality of the small metal amulets shaped as body parts and used in prayer. Here, disembodied wooden legs stand on the floor of the box and wooden arms jut from every wall.

Wire, fruit, fake fur, a clock face, miniature Coke bottles and the sole of a shoe can be found in other altars and shrines in the show. Like memory itself, these assemblages represent a compact confluence of the found and the imagined, the altered and the accepted.

Faith acts as a spiritual glue, bonding these diverse, humble elements and raising them to a higher plane. Maximiliano Pruneda’s work demonstrates this process most powerfully. His African-influenced rattles and ceremonial staffs are wrapped in cloth, tied with string and encrusted with paint. Metal rings and wooden figures dangle from them, ready to be thrust into motion during ceremonial use. Though new, the objects appear worn and weathered, making their primal, ritualistic power all the more convincing.

Carmen Lomas Garza remembers with affection an incident from her childhood when faith did transform the mundane into the sacred. In her painting, “El Milagro” (The Miracle), men, women and children gather around a water tower to stare at an image of the Virgin Mary that had formed in its water-stained wood grain. Several believers kneel in respect before the tower, while others stand with arms folded or hands tucked in pockets, interested but slightly detached. With his back to the rest, one young boy draws his own mirage in the dirt, framing it with white blossoms from a nearby bush.

Garza reclaims the purity and innocence of youth in her flat, simple, colorful style. For Celia Alvarez Munoz, once that innocence is lost, it cannot be recaptured. Several of her photo/text installations describe episodes from her youth in which new realizations interrupted her comfortable, unquestioning faith.

Appearance and reality begin to diverge in these small but epiphanic moments. In “La Honey--Enlightenment,” Munoz recounts her attachment to a doll, and her mother’s confirmation that the doll did indeed have a living counterpart. In the series of photographs accompanying this text, however, Munoz shows the doll’s head slowly turning, until the sweet, flawless face gives way to a plastic scalp, its holes exposed by violently uprooted hair.

The real and the artificial blur again in the dressing-table installation, “Chameleon.” Light bulbs frame the vanity’s mirror and a collection of cosmetics and combs litters the glass-covered table. In her text, set under the glass, Munoz reminisces about “the beauty of the family,” her aunt Lulu.

“I loved to watch when she applied her makeup,” Munoz recalls. “In amazement, I would wonder why it took her an hour and so much paint, yet, when finished she didn’t look painted.”

The poignancy of Munoz’s work owes to her incisive re-creations of intimate yet universal experiences. The moments of awakening she describes encompass knowledge and loss. They tear at the fabric of faith that wraps childhood in its uncanny purity, allowing confusion and contradiction to seep in and bring on the hardened reality of adulthood.

Memory, in Munoz’s work, is primarily personal, a reflection on vulnerabilities and vanquished expectations. Her focus on questions of faith, however, (and in “La Tempestad,” personal ritual) links her work conceptually with the show’s theme and extends its range from the most primal of expressions to the most contemporary and urbane.

“Ceremony of Memory” reaches its apex in the work of Pruneda, Garza and Munoz, though many of the other artists also touch sacred and sensitive spots in our collective memory. Faith, the show suggests, and a sense of identification with one’s ancestors and cultural heritage can help mediate the often vast gap between self and world. This assertion of cultural identity is also the most valuable weapon against the homogenizing forces of American society, forces as much at play in the institutions of the art world as in the media.

The show, which is accompanied by a well-illustrated but jargon-burdened catalogue, continues at the Centro through Jan. 7.