Sonoma museum ponders personal landscapes

The ‘what’ and the ‘where’ under the microscope at SVMA.|

Our memories are tied inexorably to place; they are two separate strands of the same rope. What happens in life cannot be separated from where, and when an experience is particularly significant, event and place synthesize as one.

Psychologists call it 'episodic memory formation,' the human tendency to link memory and place.

That unique process — the comingling of 'the what' and 'the where' — is under the microscope in the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art's new installation, 'Private Landscapes and Public Territories: Botanicals, Archives and Libraries in the Work of Amalia Mesa-Bains.'

The solo exhibit focuses in part on the divine feminine, anchored by an enormous female figure in a garden repose, gazing at her reflection in a mirror. She is both in the garden and of the garden, literally rooted in both time and place. But what she sees reflected is not what we see as we look.

'She's free to see herself in different ways,' Mesa-Bains said. 'This work is about land and people, and the notion of human geographies. It seems really pertinent now, with mass displacements worldwide, and our own particular madness at the southern border.'

A tall cupboard houses a visual history of where people come from and where they are going. Covered in mosses and littered with artifacts, the names of cities in Mexico and the United State are catalogued inside.

The importance of memory and place are represented with botanical prints, mapping images, landscape shadow boxes and altars. The themes of family geographies and historical displacements of Latino and native peoples are represented through border maps, archival images, and native plants.

'People have an attachment to land because it holds meaning for them,' Mesa-Bains said. 'The food we eat, the medicines we grow, all hold the history of time and place.'

Mesa-Bains says her narratives of human geography are intended help us to see that our private landscapes have always been part of larger public territories. What has happened to you is solidly yours, but it is part of the collective human story, too.

'Amalia Mesa-Bains' work is accessible, moving, and at times, even mystical,' said Linda Keaton, SVMA's executive director. 'Her large installation work incorporates Chicano culture and folk traditions, a natural and dynamic engagement with Sonoma's multicultural community.'

Mesa-Bains has staged exhibitions all over the world: the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum, El Museo Del Barrio in New York, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, SF MOMA, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden, the Museum of Modern art, in Dublin, Ireland, and the Culterforgenin in Copenhagen, Demark, to name a few.

'Private Landscapes and Public Territories' runs June 23 through Sept. 16, and the artist will speak about her work at SVMA on Sunday, July 22, at 3 p.m.

Contact Kate at kate.williams@sonomanews.com.

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