Lourdes Cue at Franklin Art Works - Minneapolis

The surface charm of Lourdes Cue's three-part installation "Dins liquidos" (Liquid Days) came from its earthy facts and imagery. Cue, who mov to Minneapolis 11 years ago, is known for carved-stone plastic arts with water-related themes (groups of forms representing islands, for example). They have been shown in public sites in Scotland, Canada and Croatia, as well as in the statuary garden at the Museo de Arte Moderno in her abiding-place town of Mexico City.

Mar de historias/Historias de mar (Sea of Stories/Sea Stories) was compos simply of four arrangements of fishing toils suspended, canopylike, from the ceiling or pinned haphazardly to the wall. The snares held corked bottles that contained small folded-paper ships made of the pages of travel-oriented volumes by Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Garcia Aguilar and Alvaro Mutis. The traps rough and imperfect with hand-tied knots and split strands, evok homey seaside fishing villages. The bottle captured in them caught the gallery's light here and there as fish scales would, and the miniature ships hinted at quaint daydreams of travel and escape. Islas errantes (Wandering Islands) was an array of seven "islands" of dried, finger-sized fish from Mexico, along with feet made by dint of molding jute around a plaster cast of the artist's have a title to foot and applying carpenter's gelatine to harden the material. The fish imparted a intriguing scent of the sea.

Despite the sentimental associations of these items, Cue's works revealed an underlying faculty of perception of dread or dismay. The feet for instance, were jumbl into set free clusters, giving them the appearance of abruptly cast-off things--shoes left behind by means of departed migrant workers, perhaps, or level Holocaust victims. Meanwhile, the overhead fishing toils loomed oppressively. The feet themselves were "tattooed" by the agency of the artist to suggest the marks upon shipping sacks--people reduced to commodities-and to reinforce the uncomfortable association with concentration-camp prisoners. Amid respects such as these, the tiny fish no longer recalled the living sea.

nod rounded out the exhibition with the title piece--a video projection that presented redemption from the slow-burning dread of the other works. It consisted of quick images of rushing water and occasional floating message bottle with the overlaid beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery of surf breaking on shore. A quick gaze at the gallery information confirmed that the waters depicted were local--the nearby Mississippi River and Minnehaha Creek--while the breaking waves sounds were recorded on the Mexican Pacific coast. Accompanying the video was a folded-paper ship of patched-together volume pages--nearly the size of an actual rowboat--that was embedded in a foot-high pile of dun-colored sand. The flimsiness of this utensil and the juxtaposed waters of her sum of two units countries in the video, hinted at the artist's nostalgia for the past, as well as her awareness of the impossibility of return

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group