artnexus #36

Laura Anderson (Mexico, 1958) is interested in themes that are common to many Latin American art­ ists: our surroundings and the environment and the everyday events, which take place in them.

In her case, this does not involve description based on genres with a long tradition, such as landscape art, but rather the social implications of changes in na­ ture on cultural development.

In her paintings, drawings, and sculptures as well as in her current photographs, Anderson looks at the everyday world in a way, that transcends the limits of a specific cultural space. Her long stay with the Yanomami Indians and other indigenous groups in the Amazon region of Venezuela allowed her to create works that bring together myths and legends now threatened with extinction, as well as languages that are slowly disappearing.

Her use of these spaces of nature and culture is not an attempt to recall events of the past, but to initiate a process of reflection on the complex relationship ex­ isting between the past and the present, by empha­ sizing what the loss of their traditions means for these groups.

Some of the resources used in her projects, such as words from languages on the point of disappearing, or pages from the Bible, refer to the impact, which the Catholic missionaries had on the pre-existing religious traditions of these peoples. They make us think of the cost to mankind of the convergence of such a variety of models in his habitat, a process in which man sees his natural space and culture becoming dangerously eroded. 

IVONNE PINI