In a pink, glowing Rococo setting, Yvette Mayorga’s first solo exhibition in Mexico dives into nostalgia, teenage goals, and the way typically a sugary coating can conceal essential truths.
For La Jaula de Oro—The Golden Cage—at Museo de Arte de Zapopan, the Chicago-based artist (beforehand) has created 4 acrylic-piped work on canvas and a collection of mixed-media sculptures. These embody a 1974 Datsun coated in crochet, plush and plastic toys, acrylic nails, fake fur, rosaries, and different ephemera. Pop singer Selena’s music “Dreaming of You” wafts from the automotive stereo.
At first look, Mayorga’s compositions appear as if delicate, frosted confections, glittering with nail charms and predominantly made in numerous shades of pink. However upon nearer inspection, reminders of a barely extra unsettling actuality start to emerge, comparable to scorpions, clocks, or mirrors—nods to our relationship with time, others, and our mortality.
The artist attracts on the custom of vanitas portray, a mode popularized in the course of the Dutch Golden Age, typically within the type of nonetheless lifes brimming with visible cues that energy and glory imply nothing when confronted with the inevitability of dying.
For Mayorga, the supple types of piped bows, rosettes, and borders belie essential messages centered round border management, immigrant labor, rampant capitalism, and popular culture.
Akin to the way in which cookies or muffins are created to be actually consumed, the artist toys with the notion of fleetingness. “La princesa (Ride or Die),” for instance, captures a way of ephemerality and impermanence: “here today and gone tomorrow,” says curator Maya Renée Escárcega.
The artist invitations viewers right into a seemingly carefree, saccharine house evocative of the opulence of the late 18th century—the period of Marie Antoinette and her well-known—if legendary—quote: “Let them eat cake.” Thought of the “Rococo Queen,” she is related to luxurious and frivolity, and he or she got here to represent the excesses of the rich throughout a interval when many individuals couldn’t afford bread, not to mention the delicacies of cake.
Mayorga’s major medium is acrylic utilized utilizing a pastry bag. She references ladies staff—particularly ladies of shade—from whom colonial discourse stripped notions of femininity assigned to white ladies. She expands upon the framework of Rococo to research Twenty first-century points, concurrently serving us a reminder of the sacrifices and toil required to supply what capitalist society consumes.
La Jaula de Oro and continues in Zapopan by means of January 5. Discover extra on Mayorga’s web site and Instagram.
