Margarita Cabrera

Margarita Cabrera is the artist that I chose to talk about from this first week’s presentations. I found her work to be very powerful because it makes you reflect about deeper meanings behind ordinary objects. 

The Soft Sculptures series is very intriguing to me. The pieces themselves are not very visually striking, but I find the hidden context and meaning behind them to be very powerful. One of the pieces that our classmate Kaelyn Rodriguez showed in class was the pink sewing machine. I immediately connected this object with women’s struggles, but also with maquiladora workers and the female homicides of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. First of all, the subject matter is the main tool of the thousands of women who work in sweatshops on the border to produce clothing for export. Sewing machines are generally associated with female labor. In this case, the sewing machine is also pink, which is a “feminine” color. The fact that Carbrera left the threads attached to the machine also is a reference to the process of using the machine. And finally, the material she used is vinyl, which for me refers to the idea of “cheap” mass production and consumerism. The “soft” quality of the sculpture inspires curiosity in the viewer, and also gives the object the life-like presence of having a body.