Lessons from the Shadows
Polk Museum of Art, 800 E. Palmetto St., Lakeland
Through Dec. 3.
“These women say, ‘You think you’ve got me? You don’t have my imagination. That’s mine,’” Sacabo says.
In Josephine Sacabo’s three bodies of work at the Polk Museum, she shows how your body might be held captive, but your mind and spirit can’t be taken from you.
Her series Susana San Juan is made up of silver gelatin prints based on the Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, a tragic myth of Mexico, by Juan Rulfo.
“I fell in love with the novel. It is set in a mystical sort of dream-space. Susana San Juan was taken in by Pedro Páramo, this boss of the town who worshipped her and controlled her, but she refused to surrender to him. She went crazy instead, so she wouldn’t be reached, so she couldn’t be trapped. That’s why I dedicated that series to the Susana San Juans everywhere who will not be possessed,” Sacabo says.
The images of the landscape were shot at Guerrero Viejo, the old capital of Tamaulipas, Mexico. A damn was built to flood the land, but there was such a bad drought that the ruins were coming back up out of the water. She brought her model, who is a close friend, with her to do a photo shoot on site.
“This is the first time in my career that I’ve used double images. I had these images of my model in the studio — the pictures of the nudes and semi-nudes — and I wanted her and the landscape to be one. Rather than drag her all over Mexico, I started fooling around with the idea of combining images. So most of the images I took of the model in the actual spaces, I didn’t use. I couldn’t divorce it from realism, and the novel is not realistic. It’s written in this dreamlike environment where everyone is dead, but still talking. I felt like I had a much better shot of getting that element by using double images.”
In “Susana y La Muerte,” our heroine lays on her back holding a skull above her, seeming as if she’s wrestling with death. Because in the novel Susan is speaking from her grave, it’s more like she’s fighting the death of her soul. The landscape blurs behind her, creating a darkness that she is trying to edge out of.
“There’s a line in the book that reads, ‘But what was the world of Susana San Juan that is something that Pedro Páramo would never come to know?’ As an idea for these series, I wanted to see the world through her eyes,” she says.
While each work tells a story within itself, curation is particularly important. The narrative quality of each body of work comes out even more in approaching them as a story that unfolds across the dimly lit gallery walls, further enhancing the moodiness of these black, white, and neutral-toned works.
“I used to be a documentary photographer but when I left that, I wanted to work in an imaginative, non-realistic way. Black and white — or brown and white in my case since I like the warmth of it — abstracts things from reality for a little bit. It’s hard for me to take a color photograph and have that dimension in it because your first impression is, ‘Yes, that’s what it looks like.’ I want you to go beyond that, and black and white helped me do that because it separates the viewer from reality.”
Her wet collodion tintype series Juana and the Structures of Reverie seems far from reality, jumping into a form of architectural utopia. Sacabo dedicates these to “Juana la Loca,” the “mad” Queen of Spain who was locked up in prison by her father, husband, and son.
Believe it or not, these structures are from a real place despite their ethereal look.
“I live part of the year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A photographer friend took me to this place where I walked in and it was like I died and went to heaven,” she says. “Literally I started shaking, I’ve never seen anything that moved me so much visually — purely visually. In this place, you cannot get your bearings because you can’t believe you are in the real world.”
“It’s a hacienda [large estate with a house] that’s in ruins. In its heyday, it was one of the largest, richest haciendas in Mexico. So you have this magnificent structure that’s falling apart, but you still have the wallpaper that’s there from the 17th century. Then in the 18th century, they put up some other wallpaper, so you have wallpaper coming through wallpaper. You have only halves of columns. It is so beautiful. I felt like I had found a spiritual home in this place, so that’s why there is a lot of emphasis on the architecture,” Sacabo explains.
“Juana Invents a Window” is one stand-out from this series, in which the window’s stark lines contrast against the curves of Juana’s face and hands. Acting as a mental window through which escape is possible, the window equally could be a stand-in for prison bars.
“It’s like here she is trapped in a dark dungeon and she can dream up this beautiful home, so it’s this idea of providing herself an out, spiritually, for her situation.
"I wasn’t going to use the figure at all in these series, but I wanted her spirit to come in every now and then to remind you of whose dream this is,” the artist says.
That’s why there are so many transparent walls, like in “Tristeza,” where Juana is either emerging or receding into the floral wallpaper. She looks off to the left, with her hand to her stoic, solemn face. Because of her need of a place of escape, there’s a duality in the images between a spiritual utopia and a borderline ominous space. Most of the time, our protagonist is posed in somewhat submissive, passive bodily gestures.
“It’s a process of looking within. Almost all of the images have to do with Juana dreaming or reflecting. In a way, this is my form of reflection,” Sacabo says.
Using photogravure in her series Óyeme Con Los Ojos, Sacabo tells the story of the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a self-taught scholar.
“She was the greatest poet of the 17th century of all of the new world. She was a cloistered nun because she refused to marry, but she wanted to continue her studies. She wrote incredible sonnets and became famous all over the world,” Sacabo says. “All of this was going on until the Inquisition decided she was getting way too much attention and she was saying some things that they didn’t approve of her saying.”
“Basically they came in and said, ‘That’s it, baby, we’re taking all of your books. You will no longer write, and you will be a good, subservient nun.’ They took everything, but by then her works were already published. And she did all of it from a cell,” she says. “In these little cells these women were locked into, some sort of spiritual or imaginative freedom could be possible.”
“El Fuego” shows how Sor Juana spits fire with her powerful words. Her illuminated face seems to be lit by the flames that come out of her mouth. Between Sor Juana, Juana la Loca, and Susana San Juan, these are inspirational female figures since it can still be asked to this day how women’s minds can be so threatening.
It’s not necessary to know these stories beforehand. Sacabo’s main point is that there are lessons to be learned from these dark places, where light can illuminate these hidden stories that are waiting to be told.
Caitlin Albritton, CL Tampa's visual arts critic, spends her time tracking down art you might not see anywhere else. She's also an artist in her own right. Follow her on Instagram or read her blog.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2016.