Mandy Cano Villalobos is an installation artist whose work
focuses on personal memory. Her early works are deeply personal and intimate,
dealing with belongings of her family members and her. An early work, Undone
(2006) is a wooden cabinet filled with balls of thread and yarn. Each ball of
fabric is a piece of unraveled clothing that she has reassembled into balls of
yarn. Each is labeled – “Big Daddy’s favorite sweater,” “Tim’s gloves,” “The
sweater nobody wanted to wear anymore.” The original forms and functions of
these objects exist only as memories or imagined memories for the viewer.
Analog: Private Life (2008) consists of tapes, tape
recorders, earphones, and carrying cases. Each tape is a recording of banal
moments of life, such as showering, eating and checking email. These tapes are
then meticulously labeled and categorized.
Family Meals (2005-2006) consist of food extracts sheathed
between plexi-glass. This work is a wonderful illustration of change, the
passage of time, and desire to remember. While these foods are saved as an
artifact for remembrance of family and community, the samples of food continue
to mold and congeal. A wonderful illustration of the idea that items, these
memories, still exist but that our memories can become confused and blurred and
disintegrate, despite our efforts and desires to hold onto those intangible
moments in our lives.
Her more current works have become more geared to social and
political commentary, and the work deals with the memory and identity of
specific individuals. Voces (“Voices”) (2008-present) is in mourning and
protest of the femicide in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Mandy Cano
Villalobos sits to the side of the gallery, embroidering the names of
individual murder victims into white blouses, starting with the first
documented victims in 1993.
Her most current work, Identity/Identification, is a gridded
quilt of Rol Unico Nacional (RUN) Numbers assigned to Chilean residents by the government.
When the quilt is finished it will have 27,153 RUNs of political prisoners who
were tortured, disappeared or executed under the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinoched (1973-1990). Each RUN is hand sewn with human hair onto white fabric.
Throughout her works Mandy Cano Villalobos deals with the
concept of memory and identity through mementos. Her early works are of a more
personal and familial nature that allows the viewers to image her memories and
her family, to develop their own narrative. While her later works confront
viewers with the memories of missing and murdered people. These works make the
viewer question the state of their government, community, and themselves.
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