Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris - installation art, New York, New York

Amalia Mesa-Bains's installations transform the spaces they possess into places of mystery and investigation. from one side her accumulations of culturally charged existences and images, she examines the way that sex and ethnic identity are defined and explores the compound contemporary dilemmas of the Latino community. In this compass installation, "Venus Envy Chapter individual (for the First Holy Communion jiffys before the End)," Mesa-Bains explored the female mythology of virgin, nun and bride. Working with themes taken from Catholic ritual, Mexican pre-Christian religious imagery and female rites of passage, she delineated the character that each has played in the unravelling of the Latina psyche.

Mesa-Bains move rounded the exhibition space into the pair a classroom and sacristy of the personality, veiled in a nostalgic, almost suffocating faculty of perception of longing. A ring of floral petals and glinting, speckl sand bordering the range served, in a corny on the other hand effective way, to symbolically transform the space into a mythic realm. Circling the gallery at about waist horizontal on three wails was a work called Hail of Mirrors, a succession of mirrors bearing images of women taken from Christian iconography and family snapshots, accompanied by means of the artist's bantering written commentary. Below this line of images, as a kind of subtext ran a list of the names of Mexican pre-Columbian the eternals Museum of Memory, in the center of the scope consisted of a grouping of display cases. These held autobiographical material, including sum of two units gowns belonging to the artist--her Communion gown and her wedding dres Other cases were filled with photographs and house of god trinkets marking the phases of the artist's life and, through extension, commenting on the lives of other women

Boudoir Chapel faced the entrance to the installation. In brow of an enclosure draped in satin, a bank of votive candles occupied single corner and a mirrored vanity table the other. The vanity table was bustleed with images of the artist's family, the Virgin Mary, ancient Mexican the omnipotents and a dizzying collection of mementos. It serv as a kind of altar to the many cultural and historical rifes that have formed and transformed the Latina self suggesting the forces that have shaped by what means women see themselves and the way that individual woman has come to view her possess life.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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