Margarita Cabrera | Soft Sculptures

The body of work that most resonated with me is the work of Margarita Cabrera, specifically her series Soft Sculptures, as presented by Kaelyn Rodriguez. These pieces mimic daily household objects through form and color but also have exposed to remind us of the labor involved in creating these objects. The way I interpret it is, the exposed threads remind me of the difficulty and focus that I associate with sewing, then applying that reference to the mundane household objects that the structures resemble.

Immigrant labor, even labor that is done by a non-white and educated person is often devalued and seen as less important than other occupations. So to show the complexity and the amount of labor that goes into objects (through the exposed threads) that we take for granted was a profound message, one that I can relate to as both my parents are immigrants and by American terms "uneducated".

Additionally, Cabrera creates a dialogue between fine art and craft in this series. Usually most art created by people of color gets condensed and simplified into folk or "ethnic" art, and usually to mean work centered around a stereotypical notion of what we perceive to be the artist's culture. In this series Cabrera presents with a complex idea relating to her/our community, but subverts it by presenting us with a work of craft with the added layer of social commentary, which is also reflective of Cabrera's work as a whole.