Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present a solo installation by Mexican-born Texas-based artist Margarita Cabrera at Untitled Art, Miami Beach. Booth C4 will feature embroidered soft sculptures from Cabrera’s ongoing series Space in Between and Pepita Para El Loro Para Que Hable o Calle, and abstract, cochineal-dyed works on paper from the Flujo de Extracciones series. Cabrera brings a fresh perspective to weighty ideas surrounding globalism, populism, and the migrant experience.
Space in Between reflects on the borderlands between the United States and Mexico through the fabric of one of its most ubiquitous features – U.S. Border Patrol officers’ uniforms. Cabrera has worked with this fraught material since 2010, transforming it into soft sculptures of desert plants indigenous to the region. She organizes collaborative workshops with recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, empowering them to impart their own stories on the objects with colorful thread and traditional embroidery techniques from Los Tenangos, Hidalgo, Mexico. While the resulting sculptures, planted in traditional Mexican terra cotta pots, are adorned with the deeply personal hopes, dreams, hardships, and triumphs of Cabrera’s immigrant collaborators, they also stand as ambivalent objects – thorny sentinels of the desert that represent the role of law enforcement officers as both protagonists and antagonists in the punishing desert landscape.
In playful imitation, the artist’s series Pepita Para El Loro Para Que Hable o Calle refashions U.S. Border Patrol uniforms into hand-patterned and sewn, life-size sculptures of red-crowned amazon parrots, a now endangered species native to northeastern Mexico and the southern tip of Texas. Stitched on the armatures of battery-operated robotic toys, the sculptures are each embedded with a voice-activated mimicry device that parrots the surrounding sounds and ricochets them from bird to bird across the flock. The work encourages viewer participation in a cacophonous dialogue that mirrors the politicized public discourse around border crossings, incarceration, family separations, and immigrant detention centers.
Flujo de Extracciones is a body of works on paper employing fabric collage with applications of gouache and cochineal dye, an oxidized natural pigment extracted from the eponymous insect that attaches and survives on the surface of the prickly pear cactus pads in the form of a white fungus. The vibrant purples, pinks, oranges, and reds are rich with significance; cochineal is rooted in Latin American history as one of the most valuable exports since Aztec times. The series title, “extracciones,” connotes the extraction of natural resources carried out by the American oil and mining industries, as well as the colonial commodification and exploitation of indigenous land, knowledge, and culture. Cabrera’s amorphic forms are reminiscent of truncated human torsos, or geographical spaces that map out conquered terrain, while the material adaptation of cochineal and U.S. Border Patrol uniforms center the physical, cultural, and spiritual extractions of immigrant communities within the work.
Following Cabrera’s inclusion in the exhibition say the dream was real and the wall imaginary, curated by Joseph R. Wolin, at Jane Lombard Gallery this past spring, the gallery is pleased to present a solo booth (C4) of the artist’s three distinct series at this year’s edition of Untitled Art, Miami Beach.
