Selected Entries from Write With Us

Margarita Cabrera: Contrasts and Courage at Dallas Contemporary

By Anca Turcu

Dallas Contemporary presents, through March 17th, Margarita Cabrera’s It is Impossible to Cover the Sun with a Finger. A South American proverb here meant to denote the inevitability of South-North migration on the American continent. 

Border patrol uniforms, reminiscent of the perils of desert crossings, have been embroidered by immigrants with the colors of dreams and agony. The artist then fashioned them into the desert-like landscape dotted by indigenous Mexican plants that takes up most of the floor space in this one-room exhibit. The cacti bear flowers, some stringy, most red, some yellow, one pink, crowning the fluffy, cotton-filled, faux greenery. While flowers abound, only a few thorns can be found in this landscape, unrealistically tame and limp, their near absence maybe denoting the idealism of migrant desert wanderers.

This is how the artist gives voice to the voiceless. She urges them to tell their story though embroideries similar to those messages carved into living plants all along our Southern border. She seems to urge them: Prick the uniforms of men who terrified you, stitch your dreams on their hides. Prick them with the loftiness of your hopes, with the depth of your sorrow, with the incurable sting of your regret. Over the six years old daughter that slipped from your arms in the Rio Grande, entangled by reeds that drove the life out of her. Over families back home that will not go hungry anymore, but will maybe never see you again. 

In this one room show, while the center is all about soulful contemplation, the walls tell a story too. But theirs is the realm of context and pragmatism. A timeline, starting with 1848, the year Mexico lost half its territory to the US, speaks of once fickle lines in the sand growing into fences, barriers, walls, prejudice and spontaneous graveyards, too many to count, strewn over thousands of miles. 

Next come a few framed works. One of watercolor butterflies, ethereal dreams of Southern multitudes, regimented into neat rows of disciplined aspirations, eliciting the viewer’s empathy. Eight other framed compositions turn reverie to reality. Their butterflies are of the pecuniary variety, dozens and dozens of them, penny-stamped and hued, aligned in a uniform, disarming kind of formation –that of conformity and consumerism. The real cause, they seem to suggest, of so many peripatetic adventures.

Realism also comes unframed in this exhibit. One whole wall dominated by a flag-shaped “landscape”, according to the artist, reminiscent of Manifest Destiny art. A blue, plastic, empty bucket sky reigns over the yellow “promised land” made of brooms and mop sticks: the artist’s depiction of the stereotypically inescapable confines of Latino immigrant life in America. To me, a bucket- spangled banner ready to collect the tears of millions whose dreams become drudgery, whose hopes turn into hurt, especially now, in these times of never-ending hypocrisy, and unbridled, blind, sickening hate.

One last frame has the sun covered with a border patrol uniform cutout, slightly smaller than the yellow disc behind it. It is, conspicuously, not a finger.