Back to the Roots: Marisa Caichiolo at Manhattan Beach Art Center – by Nancy Kay Turner
Marisa Caichiolo’s compelling exhibition which just concluded at the Manhattan Beach Arts Center, explores colonial legacy, the domestic sphere and collective memory in a quietly mesmerizing installation. At once both epic and intimate, Caichiolo creates a dream-like environment filled with symbolic narrative elements that juxtapose fantasy and realism while wrapping the viewer in multi-layered visual poetry.
Caichiolo has specific iconography, an alphabet of images that she uses to great effect to communicate what is hidden and concealed, buried deep or only half remembered. Roots – that system of nourishment and communication so necessary to tree survival is both fact and metaphor – here drawn on walls, attached to the bottoms of monochromatic shadowy ghost houses, or gathered in a circle underneath two columns hanging from the ceiling.
These two white dress columns are reminiscent of Baptismal gowns, christening dresses, communion and wedding dresses that hint at transitions and ritual. These dramatic dresses with their high empire waistline, decorated bodices look like inverted Greek ionic columns, while their draped column-like skirt echoes fluted marble Greco-Roman marble columns. As the materials reaches the floor, it puddles gracefully where it is ringed by roots. With many layers of meanings that suggest fashion, religion and even architecture these two, theatrical large -scale pieces highlight Caichiolo’s superb psychological use of materials.
Nearby are several images printed on a lightweight diaphanous fabric hung banner-like on the wall. One is of a section of an ancient edifice with two columns while the other is a drawn image of one of the dresses, and the third is of a singular marble column. Each appears fading, ghostly or only half-remembered. Places and spaces of private and public activities abound here.
The sense of walking through a dream landscape persists as a large mural sized photograph of a bright vista opens the room up. Clad in a long white gown (not unlike the one suspended nearby) a woman lying in repose on the bottom edge of this mysterious image prompts curiosity.
There are video monitors embedded in artificial turf that capture a performance connected to honoring the earth and planting seeds – a ritual both practical and sacred. A large still image of the lush green jungle-like environment adorns the space and a small triangular pile of earth with a seedling in it occupy the space as well. This room feels intimate, warm and speaks to survival, renewal and memory.
Cultural ideas of nourishment, of beauty or embellishment are explored here as the colonial legacy is overlaid on indigenous peoples in Latin America and everywhere that was colonized. The resulting cultural hybridity is complex and intertwined much like the roots of many trees. Caichiolo’s conceptual investigation of mixed ancestry, the role of women in preserving culture and the strength and necessity of ritual is not only elegantly installed but opens a mysterious portal in time, drawing the viewer in to ponder legacy and memory.
Leonard Bernstein said “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between contradictory answers.” In this stunning immersive exhibition Marisa Caichiolo does just that by posing questions that may be unanswerable through her inspired juxtapositions of image and material.
- Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner and Genie Davis