Enfoques

Altar Ego: Self-Representation as Sacred (Re)Connection

Kristin Kawecki

University of California, Davis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.58748/KKAES

Resumen:

“Altar Ego: Self-Representation as Sacred (Re)Connection” explores how Amelia Mesa-Bains’s altar-installation Venus Envy, Chapter One presses open the limits of the autobiography to include the influence and connection with others whose memories may be discounted or even erased by the “master narrative” of history. The altar-installation invokes a “counter-memory” of the Chicana coming of age ritual of First Communion, in which communion with feminine relations and energies are foregrounded and the importance of women’s labor in the domestic sphere is revalorized. In this, Mesa-Bains presents a method of renarrativizing the past that empowers not only herself, but the other feminine entities she was in communion with. In reconstructing the memory-reflection space surrounding this feminine communion via the altar-installation, Mesa-Bains also initiates visitors into a revelation of art’s power to (re)construct social realities, and in this, also, ideology and identity.