Women’s Work

“The Virgin, Frida and Me: Contemporary Chicana Artists”--what a striking concept for an exhibition! The combined legacies of the Virgin Mary and Aztec female deities and the most celebrated of Mexican female artists (Frida Kahlo) surely have exerted a powerful influence on Chicana artists of our time searching for appropriate mentors and exemplars.

But the nine-woman exhibition--organized by Latin American art scholar Shifra M. Goldman for the Saddleback College Art Gallery (through April 24)--has a major flaw, one that frequently bedevils serious-minded shows of art that seek above all to make a cultural statement. Too much of the work serves as little more than a flat restatement of an idea, without the aesthetic freshness, creative ambiguity or sense of presence that separates mediocre from gifted work.

There has to be something amiss when the vividness and uniqueness of an autobiographical text incorporated within a piece--or even an explanatory note about a family history--is more arresting than the art itself.

It isn’t that there is something wrong with drawing on traditional imagery, whether its roots lie in Mexican folk art or European Surrealism. But symbolism must be employed in unexpected ways to make memorable art. That’s what Kahlo did, and that’s what puts her in the pantheon.

In Elizabeth Perez’s untitled painting, parted stage curtains reveal a female tightrope walker balanced against the backdrop of a night sky. Clearly this is a painting about risk-taking; Perez even explains this in a wall text. But while the piece incorporates a Kahlo-like autobiographical aspect, the imagery is so shopworn that Kahlo’s equally renowned level of emotional impact is utterly lacking.

Aida Mancillas’ book pieces--open books containing an array of stylized images, would-be symbolic objects and handwritten words--hark back to such older illustrated literary forms as ancient Indian manuscripts. Today, we lack the common language of symbolism of centuries past; because we are exposed daily to such a fast-moving parade of images, it takes more than a didactic, one-to-one correspondence of idea to image to tantalize our imaginations.

Similarly, it is awkward to discover that the brief biographical note about her grandmother that Yolanda Lopez appends to her installation, “Border Lines: Thinking About Gramma and My Life as an American Woman,” is more riveting than Lopez’s actual piece, with its trite attempts at symbolizing the contrast between everyday domestic life in California and her grandmother’s epic struggles after crossing the Texas border in 1918 as a pregnant 26-year-old.

One common pitfall in attempting to advance a social program through art is telling rather than showing. In her “Guillermina Tellez” series, Christina Fernandez recasts the story of William Tell--the Swiss patriot obliged under pain of death to shoot an apple off his son’s head--into a latter-day myth about a Chicana whose actions led to the deposition of a Mexican dictator. But Fernandez’s photographs do not help her rather long, straightforward text yield a vivid sense of personal drama and risk.

On the other hand, it is possible to “tell” in an artful way. In “A Kind-Hearted Man,” Mancillas’ text--a story told by a woman about a man “enraged” about her “application of horseradish to raw meat”--subtly sketches the portrait of an abusive racist. The scratchier elements of the imagery mainly help support the confessional, diary-like quality of this effective piece.

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Barbara Carrasco does succeed in finding a fresh visual language for her autobiography in “Codex Carrasco.” (The title wryly proposes that a handmade document of one family’s history be equated to the valued original manuscript of a classic text.)

Using a deliberately bland style and cheery, ersatz imagery--stylized pastel kitchen tiles, faux wood grain, tiny apple prints, a daisy sticker--Carrasco illustrates the all-American aspects of her family’s life: brand-name products, the Flintstones, a ticket to Disneyland. But little ironies crop up, much like the omnipresent scorpion patterns on the TV--in particular, the snapshot with the caption “Still in the projects.”

Ultimately, the artist in the show who most believably embodies Kahlo’s self-probing, poetic flamboyance is Laura Aguilar. Her work has a striking duality: self-effacing, black-and-white photographs of flower offerings on grave sites on the Day of the Dead, and a semi-nude self-portrait photograph with charged yet highly ambiguous political overtones.

Although most of the untitled grave photographs are simply sober documents of a tradition, one image stands out. Using an abrupt, downward angle on an awkwardly positioned statue of a pensive praying angel in an impoverished setting, Aguilar delicately evokes a sense of displacement and loss.

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In “The Eagles Flying,” she reveals a stunning mixture of self-doubt, self-exposure and defiant presence, with heavy rope anchoring an American flag swaddling her hips and a Mexican flag sealing off her head. Free yet condemned, labeled in two mutually contradictory ways, both of which hobble but fail to completely contain her real self, Aguilar offers a powerful image of unresolved duality.

Although one could wish for more equally powerful works, Goldman deserves praise for her tireless efforts on behalf of Latino and Chicano art in general and for her most informative essay for this show, available as a free handout at the gallery.

* “The Virgin, Frida and Me: Contemporary Chicana Artists,” through April 24, Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Hours: Noon-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Monday; noon-4 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday. Admission free. (714) 582-4924.