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Carrucho, 2000

Mixed media installation

Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero’s work examines historical architecture and its frequently colonial and patriarchal implications. As a Puerto Rican feminist, she engages sexual politics as well as mythological and religious symbolism. Her newest project, Carrucho, investigates the meanings of the shell: armor, home, religious symbol, sexual metaphor, ubiquitous Puerto Rican animal, and Caribbean icon. Carrucho (Queen Conch) is comprised of a series of sculptural objects, saturated color photographs of these and other objects, and drawings from all of the above. Her use of multiple media amplifies the work’s meaning. Her topic is the chain of signification within various representations of the shell. Like a child’s game of telephone, she shifts between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, playing across media to enhance her stratigraphic activity.

Cast resin sea-shells, mounted on toy truck wheels which are operated by remote-control, are absurd sculptures which propose to update to the bumbling crustacean. Another disturbing and powerful part of this series is a Barbie doll onto which Rivera Marrero has sculpted, in candy-colored Plasticine, a large snail shell. This grotesquification of the idea of woman as absence transforms that painful reminder of absence into a powerful and aggressive presence.

Rivera Marrero has created a series of drawings from the sculptures and photos in a quick, continuous-contour style. Their adaptation to black and white outline drawings negates the colorful, plastic specificity of the objects. Her drawings are almost childlike in their coloring-book simplicity. The gaze is a heady, blurry-eyed innocence.

Rivera Marrero’s color photographs of mannequins, dolls, and Barbies, posed with the shells, are in the tradition of the photographers Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons. In these photographs, Rivera Marrero presents carnivalesque, candy-colored scenes which revolve around the shell, referring to childhood (through the toys and inscrutable mannequins) and the ambiguous sexuality of early development.

Her most recent set of works in the Carrucho series, ELA, builds on these references. ELA refers to Puerto Rico’s political status, or "Estado Libre Asociado"–the irony of the "Free, Associated State." Rivera Marrero pictures the acronym as a palidromic pun on the Spanish male and female pronouns: "He" = EL (A), and "She" = (E) LA. This work, through the metaphor of the transvestite as model, presents the idea of "having it both ways"–sexually and politically. This picture of a new sexual and political mode is both celebratory and harshly poignant. While the imagery continues to build on notions of birth, sexuality, transformation, and protection, the shell here also serves to hide the ugly truth. –DC

Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero (b. Morovis, Puerto Rico, 1967) holds her Bachelors’ degree in sculpture from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan). She did post-graduate studies in sculpture and art theory at Yale University (New Haven, CT).

Recent individual exhibitions include Carrucho 2, Museo de Ballaja (San Juan, PR, 2001), Carrucho, Espacio de diseño (San Juan, PR, 2000), and A Esop A Ekirts, Liga de Arte de San Juan (San Juan, PR, 1998).

Notable recent group exhibitions include Ambiguo, Fortaleza 202 del Viejo San Juan (San Juan, PR, 2000), IV Certamen Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (Santurce, PR, 2000), Arte Joven (exposición itinerante), Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce, PR, 2000), and Espacios en Transición-Transición en Espacio, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (Santurce, PR, 1998).