Exhibit Sees Day of Dead as Fusion of Cultures

The three installations in the show, “Ambientaciones 1492-1992,” occupy three distinct places on the spectrum from straightforward documentation to poetic interpretation.

All three artists in this exhibition at the Centro Cultural de la Raza interweave Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) ritual imagery with issues surrounding the quincentenary of Columbus’ arrival on American shores. Despite the broad range in expression, all three works elicit a similar, middle-ground response--interest, but not intense passion.

The work of Kathleen Robles, who describes herself as a photographer-anthropologist, occupies the informational end of the spectrum and helps set a foundation for understanding the installations by the other two artists, Arinda Caballero and Graciela Ovejero.

Robles presents a series of color photographs made in Oaxaca, Mexico, of various aspects of the Day of the Dead celebration. The documentary images show loaves of special bread and sugared skulls prepared for the occasion, and cemeteries where families have gathered to eat, play and sit quietly around the graves of their relatives.

Robles has also collected carved and vibrantly painted wooden figures, common to Oaxaca, of crouching animals, devils having drinks and skeletons playing guitars. Many of these appear in a room-size re-creation of a contemporary Day of the Dead altar, alongside offerings of vegetables, flowers, candy, dolls and chocolate. Also in the room are images of Christian saints and the dead Christ, surrounded by rings of votive candles on the floor.

What this installation shows, in the most direct, unmediated way, is how syncretic the Day of the Dead rituals have become. They meld the candid, sensuous and often humorous approach to death favored by indigenous peoples with the more somber, hallowed attitude brought here by Christians. In this installation, the native and the imported (or imposed) fuse painlessly, perhaps even fruitfully. Robles presents the contemporary manifestation of those overlapping traditions without deep probing or protest.

Caballero does much the same but is more overt in defining the meeting of the cultures as a confrontation. In her installation, a darkened room with altar and wall murals, conquistadors and conquered literally face off in brightly painted representations on opposite walls, but sparks don’t fly and violence doesn’t erupt. Instead, the native rituals simply take on characteristics and attributes of the invading culture--one puppet mounted on the wall has a Mickey Mouse face, and the stream of altar offerings on the floor includes play U.S. money.

On one wall, Caballero has painted a skeleton labeled Mexico hanging on a cross. The halo of air mail envelopes crowning its head suggests the distant origins of the violent machinations that have taken place on American shores since 1492. But throughout Caballero’s installation, the sense of conflict remains implicit rather than explicit, and like Robles, her altar reflects fusion more than friction.

Ovejero’s work, titled “Freedom Ghost,” shares the same basic altar format and desire to commemorate the dead, but is far more personal and provocative than the others. On the central wall, over a table heaped with bread rolls, Ovejero has mounted a collage of photographs aligned in a cross. The images show the arms and feet of a sculpted crucifixion and a woman, presumably the artist herself, with face and body painted to resemble a skeleton. In various images, she masks her face with her fingers, covers her eyes, screams and turns. The poses suggest the flux attending the transition from life to death, the separation of body and spirit.

On the two side walls, larger photographs seem to bear out this interpretation, for they depict the same painted woman moving ghost-like through space, the soul leaving the body perhaps, and leaving multiple impressions of its movements.

Ovejero has broadened the Day of the Dead theme to embrace the tension between body and spirit at the point of death. Small images of a statue of liberty in the plaza of her hometown in Argentina also appear in the installation. With the help of the artist’s accompanying statement, these images set up a fascinating analogy between the spirit freeing itself from the body and Argentina asserting its independence from Spain.

Guest curator Juanita Purner has done well to structure this exhibition around the Day of the Dead celebration as it reflects the legacy of conquest. The pairing of the themes triggers several insights and helps extend a chapter of history into a contemporary context. “Ambientaciones,” which is part of IN/SITE 92, doesn’t always fly but is very well grounded.

* Centro Cultural de la Raza, in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove off Park Boulevard, through Nov. 22. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday noon-5.

SOMA Gallery is featuring a small installation by local artist Amanda Farber and work by two artists who wear the influence of their mentors as a yoke as much as an inspiration.

Farber’s work, part of IN/SITE 92, is titled “In/here,” and consists of six painted sculptural objects mounted on three walls. Two are meant to be read as parentheses: they punctuate and embrace the oversized plums, tornado and wishbone within their curving brackets. Unfortunately, Farber’s works here are all parenthetical, in the sense that they lack any central or essential meaning. The objects are endearingly clumsy, as Farber’s work tends to be, and they play with issues of scale and the gap between a referent and its representation. But “In/here” lacks the formal cleverness and conceptual vigor that has distinguished Farber in the past.

Eric Johnson is a sculptor who has worked extensively with Tony DeLap, and now pays homage to the influence of the elder artist’s elegant and canny forms. Johnson’s work can be strikingly beautiful in its fusion of organic and geometric shapes. “Feather” twists gracefully to a height of nearly 10 feet, its wooden ribs evoking the fine strands of an actual feather and its translucent fiberglass-like skin exposing the skeletal structure that gives the form such simple integrity. Other works, exquisitely crafted of natural woods, are honest and solid in their construction, whether shaped like a pinwheel or a curling pod.

Johnson is of two sensibilities, however, and apart from these lyrical, sensuous works are others, far more bland, that borrow from the “finish fetish” aesthetic of slick surfaces and more minimal, machine-made forms. In one untitled sculpture that joins a tall wooden rod with a coral colored glass bulb, the two forces collaborate, instead of competing, and the result is a work of intriguing texture and ingenuity.

Martin Facey, of Albuquerque, hasn’t managed to transcend his influences as successfully as Johnson. Facey’s work bears the oppressively strong imprint of Richard Diebenkorn, for whom he worked as a studio assistant. But where Diebenkorn’s abstract paintings manage to feel fresh and dynamic despite their limited formal vocabulary, Facey’s are contrived, dull decoration. And though both artists use a similar palette of aquas, greens and whites, Diebenkorn’s hues are pure atmosphere and light, while Facey’s are saccharine and cloying.

* SOMA Gallery, 343 4th Ave., through Nov. 22. Open Tuesday through Thursday 11-6, Friday and Saturday 11-8, Sunday noon-5.

ART NOTES

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have organized a two-day seminar titled “Reinventing Nature: Ecological Art and Social Responsibility,” to be held Nov. 6 and 7 at UC San Diego. The event, free and open to the public, will feature presentations by the Harrisons, who teach at UCSD; George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley; historian William Cronon from the University of Wisconsin; UCSD poet Jerome Rothenberg, and performances by the African American dance troupe, “Forces of Nature.” Friday’s events will take place from 8 to 10:30 p.m. in the Humanities and Social Science Building, Room 2250. On Saturday, events will be held from 10-12:30 and 1:30-5:30 in UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium. For further information, call Helen Mayer Harrison at 481-9351. . . .

Sculpture by local artist Mathieu Gregoire is on view at the Jan Turner Gallery in Los Angeles through Nov. 14. . . .

The October issue of the magazine “Art in America” features a statement on art and politics by San Diego photographer and collaborative artist Elizabeth Sisco.