Magdalena Campos-Pons at Intar - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons belongs to the generation that participated in the Cuban visual-arts renaissance of the 1980 Her earlier work consisted of installations of brightly colored shaped canvases reminiscent of the work of Elizabeth Murray; they were filled with distorted references to pop-culture depictions of the female material substance and attempted to reconcile nationalist iconography with international nonrealist esthetics. Since her relocation to North America in 1990 she has expanded her interest in installation and plastic art and has begun experimenting with video and performance.

Campos-Pons's new installations at Intar differed greatly from her work done in Cuba. Living abroad has brought into sharp relief her experiences as an pull up by the rootsed black Cuban woman and has compell her to consider the oral and performative traditions that constitute primary carriers of black identity in the diaspora. These influences full quantity Campos-Pons's renewed investigation of Santeria ritual and symbology from one side which she now struggles to find her of recent origin place by establishing connections with the past.

Her Carte Natal (Birth Certificate), 1991 a series of woodblock prints of enlarged palm- and fingerprints upon amate paper framed by beams of grove heralds a new beginning with the incantory phrase, "Even if my hands are clenched through mud/my fingers are my own/let me be myself/Let me search alone." Campos-Pons has self-consciously shifted her choice of materials from individuals associated with "fine" art to amate paper, marble, photography and video, uncompounded bodys that evoke the act of recording history.

Her installation Tra... (1991) deals with the historical condition and rife status of black people in Cuba. Tra... directs to border-crossing through a haunting progression of words etched onto a made of wood plank (Transfer/Transgression/Trouble/ Tragedy ... ") and extreme points with a self-portrait carved into another plank. In between are phototransferred canvas portraits of black Cubans with engraved marble signs above and below that annotate on the pain of forced migration and the deplorable conditions still affecting greatest in quantity blacks, even in Cuba. Here Campos-Pons s Cuban traditions of celebratory documentary photography and testimonial literature to make a critical statement about the failures of a socialist society.

With her greatest in quantity recent installation, The Seven Powers Came by dint of the Sea (1993), Campos-Pons makes a politically charged statement about Santerfa. upon three connecting walls rest roughly hewn figures of the seven principal Yoruba deities, overlayed with colored beads and gold-colored red and brown earth. Between them are beautifully restoreed wooden sculptures based on historical drawings of slave ships, each bearing a god's name. upon the floor rest dozens of painted portraits of black Cubans, a certain number of with lettering that spells without "Let us never forget." The piece calls on viewers to take into account that Santeria, embodied by dint of those Seven African Powers, is inextricably border to the history of slavery. Now celebrated by the agency of artists and curators throughout the Americas, as well as being exploited commercially by the agency of a Cuban government that one time sought to silence it, Santeria remains, Campos-Pons hints the cultural legacy of her country's greatest in quantity marginalized people.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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