A world in reverse: the work of Maritza Molina.

Maritza Molina is a Cuban-born artist who has lived in Miami since the mid-1980s. Gaining access to her work requires understanding the relationship between her early life in Havana, the circumstances of her move to Miami, and the social complexities affecting Cubans locally and abroad. It is impossible to reflect on her work outside her cultural scope as her work does not deal with essentialisms, but departs from the premise of being socially contextual. Encompassing photography, performance, and video, her work draws from three main influences: the ambiguous relationship between family traditions, her ritualized connection to nature, and the traumatic experiences suffered during her family's escape from Cuba.

Music has been a strong influence in Molina's life. Growing up in a family of classical musicians (her father is a classical guitarist and her mother an opera singer), Molina spent most of her childhood around concert halls, street performances, and family gatherings where musicians, artists, and family friends would get together to perform throughout the night. When she later moved to Miami, it was her lather's artistic network that gave the young Maritza the support she needed to pursue a career in the visual arts. Along with "String Resonance" (an exhibition she curated featuring thirty-one artists), Molina's 2002 photographic piece, Dreaming of a Composition #1, was featured in the 2002 Sun Waves Guitar Fest in Miami which was sponsored by the Guitar Foundation of America, directed by Molina's father. Dreaming of a Composition #1 displays the artist lying down on a concrete floor donning a short nightgown with a day-dreamy expression on her face, surrounded by guitars, a cello, and music sheets. The cello represents the artist's early music lessons as well as childhood memories of a world of music--an homage to her father. In the photograph, all instruments lack their strings. The strings are all tangled up near the artist's hands, and she tries to untangle them, as if trying to sort out her childhood memories. For the artist, the piece symbolizes a return to the basics, to a primal stage, as suggested by the ground of concrete. This barren stage is the foundation for the composition of a work of music and a work of art. Though Molina's main intention is to honor the sharing of music between father and daughter, it is also a more general tribute to the passage of tradition and heritage from one generation to the next. Additionally, there is also a reference to the more formalist perspective linking the physical female form to that of the string instrument--a harkening back to many male artists' interpretations throughout the ages.

Though Molina's early experiences of her country suggest a happy childhood in a creative and receptive environment, her early experiences with political turmoil were deeply traumatic during the months anticipating her family's escape from Cuba. When her father's plans to flee Cuba were leaked to the authorities, her family became a target of severe persecution at the hands of authorities and neighbors alike--even living under house arrest and constant threats. She recalls recurrent nightmares over the years in which she saw the faces of men outside her window and heard their voices screaming death threats to her father while they brutally pounded on the front door of the family home. After fleeing with her parents and siblings to Miami, Molina's life was strained with other sets of challenges. So shy that some thought her mute, the young Maritza, at a loss between malls and streets jammed with cars and people (polarities apparently too chaotic to swallow) struggled to adapt to the American lifestyle. Fortunately, her parent's connections in both music and visual arts eventually afforded Maritza a comfort zone. Miami offered both the economic opportunities and the familiarity of being among other Cubans while most of the traditions of old Havana were preserved.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Bruised (2001-2002) is a 40-minute installation/performance in which the artist lays on a bed made of pointed high heels from numerous shoes. Resembling a bed of nails, the shoes represent the various phases lived in the life of the artist. As Molina states, "They are the challenging experiences, identities, and roles, which are present in my memory." (1) Molina is dressed in nine outfits, one over the other, each of a different color referring to different emotions. At her bedside, a video shows the artist's face screaming phrases expressing self-blame and self-reproach, appropriated from life experiences in which she is blamed or reproached by acquaintances or relatives. Periodically, the video cuts to shoes being thrown at the white front door of a house, creating an echoing knock and leaving imprints on the door. During these cuts, Molina sits on the bed and removes her outfit, revealing a new color underneath, and lies back down. She repeats this act until the end of the piece, where she is left exposing the marks and bruises on her back from being crushed against the armature of pointed heels. The clothes are the shedding of time, the removal of painful memories. The final stage includes different endings according to the space and audience. In one ending, the artist pulls out a pillowcase and pen from a small wooden box under the bed and, with backward lettering, writes Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, But Words Can Kill You. Reflecting on the fragility of the human psyche, the bed becomes a field of interior battles rather than a place of repose. The endurance and sublimation of pain is also deeply connected to the expectations put on women by modern society. For centuries, the bodies of women have been silenced by both physical and emotional pain, forced by laws that do not protect women, or by the fostering of a patriarchal tradition that sees women as bodies: pure, young, beautiful, healthy, and unthreatening.

The photographic piece Covered by Tradition (2003) shows a woman lying on a field of dirt with her face covered by her white skirt and her arms bent upwards, reminiscent of the rigid body of a doll. Her body is covered with white powder, a material used in many of Molina's works. In Molina's childhood memories, her grandmother powdered her body after a bath, an act the artist associates with feeling clean and pure. Historically, the white powder's relation to cleanliness is also associated with whiteness, an ideal that many Latin cultures adapted from European and North American cultures as a manner of equating race with issues of class and social status. Even though Cuba is socialist and has been for more than five decades, certain cultural values have been made popular due to their easy economic access, rather than through the sharing of critical knowledge. A clean and sanitized society also makes references to early class divisions in other Latin cultures, with street cleaning signifying the scourging of homelessness and other threats. Thus, the concept of cleansing goes far beyond class divisions and is still present as part of xenophobic policies in many countries today. The connection with the work of the late Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta is intentional. The piece was a commission to create a conceptual portrait of a Latino icon, and Molina chose the work of Mendieta, whose references are the display of the body on the dirt, and the position of the arms, seen in Mendieta's "Silhouette" series. What remains is a conceptual self-portrait of Molina paying homage to her spiritual connection to Mendieta. Most importantly, however, is that Molina chose Mendieta because both artists experienced the feeling of bicultural displacement.

Memory Line (2005) is a photographic piece showing the artist and various objects from her childhood in Cuba, all hanging on a clothing line. Among the objects are a rag doll, a house dress made by her grandmother, a microphone referring to her mother's opera singing, cooking pots, and paper boats, which Molina and her sister sent down the stream at the curb in front of their house on rainy days. The piece was conceived after a dream where the artist was flying to the backyard of her family's home in Cuba and landing on a clothing line from where she watched, with great joy, her father playing guitar and her grandmother sweeping the floor. In the dream, suddenly everyone starts to disappear, and Molina, gasping for air, fears that her past is gone. This apparently playful and humorous piece reflects the dualities between play and loss and the frailty and fragmentation of memory. This piece was very difficult to compose since Molina did not manipulate her photographic work in the computer, but constructed it physically from scratch. To be able to hang herself from the clothing line, she consulted people in the circus to find the correct rope that would withstand her weight without slacking.