MARI CARMEN CARRILLO

ARMADILLO,
Sep 8 - Nov 3, 2007



Mi obra se nutre del relato infantil, de la mitología universal y de mi propia cotidianidad, de lo femenino en tanto repetición continua de actividades: bordar, coser, tejer…..Creo vestidos metáforas del cuerpo que los contiene, como una segunda piel, como armazón, como prolongación de nuestros deseos, anhelos y de nuestra psiquis.









Gasa quirúrgica, espejos, espinas, pieles y dientes, frondosas faldas que albergan en su interior diminutas rosas, constituyen algunas de los elementos del andamiaje creativo del que dispongo para crear estos objetos escultóricos y ensamblajes.
MARI CARMEN CARRILLO
Caracas, 2006.















THE ARMADILLO

The armadillo is an animal whose skin defends it from the outside, and I have assumed this outfit as an enclosure and a second skin that covers the body. The armadillo is an animal that sends me to medieval times, so when I made my first dresses, this and objects of torture and capital punishment during the inquisition was my original source of inspiration. In addition, I took up this as title among others because one day speaking with Antonieta Sosa about my work, who I highly respect, she mentioned that my work gives the impression of animals being worked with vegetal matter. That gives my work a double discourse, that which has had always; as dialect between the fragility and the toughness of a thorn; the subtlety of feminine work and the aggressiveness of the thorn, inside and outside, the pain and the irony,…


Armadillo


Consumed

So many things in an overcoat! – When circumstances and men make it speak.
H. de Péne




In Mari Carmen Carrillo’s delicately crafted installation “ARMA-rio” three small dresses hang neatly on a clothes rack as if animated by invisible bodies. Made of acrylic gesso painted white, outside and inside each dress is painstakingly embroidered with rose thorns. To complete the wardrobe the artist has also fashioned tiny hyper-feminine shoes and handbags. The whole feel is that of a boutique or of an exquisite boudoir of a dollhouse. But far from child’s play “ARMA-rio” reveals a psychological complex world where beauty and violence, the domestic and the surreal, the familiar and the uncanny intertwine. It also reminds us that before slipping into the realm of childhood toys belonged to the world of adults. Think for example of the Victorian era where toys and dollhouses were socially acceptable playthings especially for grown-up women who integrated them into their private lives.


Sculptural dresses are a recurrent element in Carrillo’s elaborated installations, which resonate with influences ranging from the tradition of religious illuminated miniature books, Mexican ex-votos, western fairy tales and surrealist iconography. But beyond looking at clothes as objects of desire or as a pretext to critique the fashion system, in Carrillo’s work the dress is foremost, a prolongation of the body, a metonymy for the human skin. “Modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul,” claimed James Joyce asserting thus a displacement from the invisible to the visible. Carrillo’s work revolves precisely around the female skin as an extension of her psychic life, the eroticism of the surface and the epidermis as the locus of both pain and sensuality.



Evolving from her “Wounded Dresses” series--where the artist treated miniature garbs as injured bodies-- Carrillo has developed larger scale installations such as “Reversible”. Here the artist has produced a wall drawing depicting a diagram of her own apartment (“a quotidian labyrinth in which I often loose myself” ). Accompanying the wall drawing there is a hand made reversible quilt. On the surface of the quilt the same diagram has been stitched with black surgical thread. The bed cover invokes thus an injured and badly repaired membrane and the poetics of the handcrafted are disturbed by signs of physical wounding and emotional turmoil.


If there is a work where a “hidden” story is pushed to the forefront it is in “Escaparate – Caperuza Reversible” (“Display Case- Reversible Hood”). For the installation -- a visual re-telling of “Little Red Riding Hood”-- the artist has devised a Plexiglas case that contains two pint-size reversible hoods with laced petticoats. The outside of the coats is made of animal skin while the inside is covered with a blood-red cloth. At a closer look the delicate petticoats reveal bloody incisions.















The Plexiglas case also contains drawers, each of which displays diminutive elements (a wooden hand mirror, a human braid, coyote teeth, another reversible hood). In all its obsessive detail the installation conjures up the work of a taxidermist. The result is a creepy and humorous catalogue of female fetishism. But here fetishism is reclaimed by the artist as a subversive strategy instead of a psychological malaise. In several occasions Carrillo has emphasized her interest in exploring the complex relationship and porous boundaries between the role of the victim and the victimizer, and ultimately how these roles are easily exchanged . In “Escaparate,” in an ironical reversal of the tale, it is Little Red Riding Hood who after a deadly embrace, has devoured and flayed the wolf and now happily ever after wears his fur as her own.

Euridice Arratia





In her Wounded Dresses series, Mari Carmen Carrillo speaks of feminine in relationship to the realm of the domestic, specifically the activity of sewing. Her sculptures are toy-like dresses that seem inhabited and animated by invisible bodies. They also remind us that toys, before entering real of childhood, belonged to the world of adults and were socially acceptable playthings especially for grown-up women who integrated toys and dollhouse into their private lives (…). The outcome is fetishistic in its obsessive attention to detail, and the sculptures reveal a friction between the beauty of the finished miniature garb and visual references to injury. By using acrylic gesso and surgical bandages in the dresses and embroidering the surfaces, Carrillo invokes a painfully fractured body that still finds solace in ornament. Her wounded dresses, some decorated with feathers and some with intricately woven patterns, reveal at closer look bloody incisions, which turn the dress into a metonymy for female skin.

Euridice Arratia, Not To Scale, Dorsky Gallery, NY, 2003.







La obra de la artista Mari carmen Carrillo consiste en indagar en eso que ella llama “la segunda piel humana”, es decir en la vestimenta, en la forma como acostumbran a investirse –manifestarse- socialmente los seres humanos. Para Carrillo la ropa es una continuación de la estructura psicológica, la superficie de la vida interior.(…)
Carrillo señala que intenta atrapar con materiales experimentales diversos rostros de la condición femenina sin obviar su rol mitológico, sin obviar los cuentos infantiles y la fábulas. Una de las series que presenta Carrillo en Escaparate se atiene a la anécdota de Caperucita y el Lobo. Este relato lo utiliza la autora para desarrollar las complejas relaciones entre victima y victimario y sus roles intercambiables. Además de sus acostumbrados trocitos de tela, Carrillo reproduce piel de lobo, acude a dientes de coyote, los vestidos aparecen mordidos, atravesados por colmillos. El resultado: el destino concluido al que parecerían llegar estas piezas son el masoquismo y el sadismo en un territorio en el que se confunden.
“Otro discurso aquí presente es la dialéctica de la rosa. Sus espinas frente a la tersura de sus pétalos y fragancia. La rosa en sí es un elemento simbólico siempre permanente…”. La rosa para ella encierra los dos lados de una relación espinosa y dulce. Y en este mismo juego de ambivalencias la artista se ha interesado en trabajar la idea de reversible. “Trabajo los vestidos por dentro y por fuera”.
“El uso del hilo en sus obras aluden a figura míticas como las Moiras, las Parcas y el hilo de la vida. Esto, la sutura, el zurcido de lo emocional, se suma a las heridas verticales y horizontales de mis piezas y sus estampados en llaga que refieren a lo emocional. He hecho vestido con espinas exteriores y rosas internas. Siempre busco elementos simbólicos del imaginario universal en vestidos que son continuación del cuerpo. Me apropio de fábulas, historias y relatos universales, y los hago coincidir con mi propia cotidianidad(…)”


Edgar Alfonso-Sierra, Mari Carmen Carrillo dejó abierto su escaparate”,
El Nacional, martes 20 de diciembre del 2005.