The U.S.-Mexico border is more than 1,950 miles of territory inhabited by roughly 19 million Americans and 11 million Mexicanos. It forms the potential backdrop for the longest ongoing imagined film noir in North American history.
The border exists, for many, as a space outside the boundaries of mainstream culture, a zone of transgression inhabited by shady characters, dens of iniquity, moody lighting and three-legged dogs. That's not to say that very real and very deadly dangers don't exist in the region, but reality long ago spilled over into the realm of fiction, creating a dystopian narrative set in an environment that many see as hostile to all of its inhabitants.
For many born and raised on the border, however, the realization that a political boundary is itself arbitrary and fictive comes at an early age. It's permeable not just physically but culturally, intellectually and socially. It's not just a zone of transgression (or a zone to be transgressed), but a mixing pot on hyperdrive — a tumultuous place of shifting possibilities with multiple histories waiting to be written.
El Paso-born conceptual artist Celia Álvarez Muñoz works in a variety of media including artist's books, photography, installation and public art. According to Muñoz, who was born in 1973, growing up in post-depression El Paso engendered a physical and temporal agility that allows her to navigate disparate social spaces efficiently and proficiently.
Often, when people talk about border culture, they tend to make sweeping generalizations, which don't consider the ethnic and cultural variation within a vast geographic region of which San Antonio is a part of, culturally speaking. For Muñoz, this adds to her infatuation with specific communities and the plurality of voices contained therein.
"Some people are more informed or invested in regionalism. More politicized. More deeply informed. More affected by the regions' conflicts or what it offers positively, culturally and geographically. Less superficial," the artist says.
Such work can either contrast with or parallel her own but, either way, bears equal interest. As such, her creations tend to shift between micro and macro glimpses behind the veil of the personal and the private.
Muñoz' romance with San Antonio began more than 30 years ago.
"I respond to the city's scale," she says. "Especially its urban center. Its neighborhoods at every turn. Its fidelity to its natural resources, and to its proud rooted mixture of Latino ethnicity. I became acquainted with artists and their work when I juried an annual Contemporary Art Month exhibition, Blue Star 8, back in the '90s, and visited a good number of artists' studios. I found them informed and politicized, yet very approachable. I liked their work, motives and commitment. It was a golden moment in San Antonio."
To capture that cultural moment, Muñoz began to document San Antonio artists in 2002, when she developed the series Semejantes Personajes/Significant Personages for her solo exhibition, Stories Your Mother Never Told You, at Blue Star Art Space — now the Contemporary at Blue Star. Of the 41 portraits she originally exhibited, the Linda Pace Foundation/Ruby City recently acquired 19. This series forms the core of her current exhibition Los Brillantes (The Brilliant Ones) at Ruby City.
The exhibition also includes airbrushed works that highlight an architectural feature that embellishes otherwise traditional American bungalows around town: trabajo rústico (rustic work), more commonly known as faux bois, a distinct technique in which an artist manipulates concrete with shaping tools and stains to resemble real wood. Examples of trabajo rústico could once be found all over town thanks to Mexican artisan Dionicio Rodríguez, who moved his studio to San Antonio in the early 20th century.
Once encountered, the artistry of trabajo rústico isn't easily forgotten.
Muñoz' portraits are technically distinctive as well. Shot on a Holga, an odd medium-format film camera with a fixed aperture, focal length and shutter speed. The Holga allows the photographer to advance the film at will, creating multiple exposures, happenstance flares and impromptu distortions in a single frame.
Her subjects were not specifically asked to pose. Rather, they were photographed in their studios, either at work or in conversation with others or the photographer. The result is a series of singular images reflecting various levels of interaction with the camera, ranging from total disregard to the familiarly artificial: arms crossed, poreless skin, coiffed hair, eyes leveled at the camera lens — affectations a portrait session seems to traditionally evoke, even in the most complex people.
The artist then further manipulated the images digitally to resemble contact sheets, inserting layers that mimic motion and add visual interest. Each is as distinct as the subject and reflects the levels of tweaking the artist saw fit to impose. Aside from the aesthetic and archival relevance of these images, they are also unique in that subjects can be revisited — even the ones who are no longer with us — and introduced to future audiences.
As a series, it is heartfelt — even loving — open ended and forward focused, suggesting stories yet to come.
Los Brillantes (The Brilliant Ones), Free, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday through Jan. 19, 2025, Ruby City, 150 Camp St., (210) 227-8400, rubycity.org.
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