Stories your Mother Never Told You, Alvarez Munoz

Stories your Mother Never Told You, Alvarez Munoz’s contribution to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center’s exhibit entitled Family Stories, builds upon the theme of a multiplicity of narratives coexisting uneasily together. One portion of Munoz’s contribution, “wonder cabinet”, is a nod at 16^th and 17^th century collecting habits that positioned objects of curiosity together tightly in a room with no regard to subject matter. A fine art sculpture could be placed on the same shelf as a stuffed carcass in a 16^th century wonder cabinet. Similarly, Munoz’s cabinet has several drawers that seam incongruent in theme, yet all tell stories of personhood. One drawer is filled with individual accounts of memories, while another is filled with dental casts. Looming over the cabinet is a tree of life, which biblically is a tree of knowledge, painted on the wall behind the cabinet. Visually the tree of life seems to grow from the cabinet implying that knowledge grows from a variety of understandings of the world. However, this multiplicity of understandings is not readily reconcilable to the viewer. Perhaps the cabinet represents a hierarchical form of knowledge, an epistemological question, or maybe a dialogic understanding of memory.