Made in Mexico

Take the green line to Hynes Convention Center, turn left onto Boylston Street and step out into Mexico City.

Well not quite, but The Institute of Contemporary Art's new exhibit, "Hecho en Mexico" (Made in Mexico) will at least make visitors feel as if they've had a taste of the sprawling metropolis that lies south of the border.

The exhibit covers the entire expanse of the small ICA museum. The show features various themes such as life in contemporary Mexico, outsiders' visions of the country, and Mexico's relationship with its own culture and folklore.

In the making of her Guadeloupe exhibit, Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born artist living in London traveled to the much-revered tomb of St. Guadeloupe for her documentary-style video, "Video of the Shrine of Guadeloupe." The video depicts the tomb's trademark scene: a canary bird sitting outside of the shrine in a cage. In the film, an older man periodically opens the cage to let the tiny yellow creature fly out as it performs odd tricks for kernels of food.

Next to this slightly amusing video is a giant, human-sized bird cage entitled, "The Mexican Cage." This wooden structure, painted in vibrant shades of pink, blue and yellow, is meant to represent Hatoum's opinion of Mexico's fervent religious traditions as well as the country's treatment of animals. The bright colors of the human-sized cage are almost insulting, as cheery as they are, to Mexican culture.

In a tongue-in-cheek look at Mexico's euro-centric class is Daniela Rossell's series on wealthy Mexican women, "Ricas y Famosas." Rossell's work draws attention to a stratified rift in the country where wealthy upper class women have blonde hair and opulent, ostentatious lives while the poor citizens can't afford proper funerals for their dead family members.

In Rossell's piece "Last Supper," a golden haired woman sits at a large white and golden dining room table alone. She looks sullen and striking at the same time. The Baroque-style room is decorated with lavish detailing like ornate wallpaper and decorations, a large candelabrum in the center of the table and, the pi? ce de r‚sistance, a large reproduction of da Vinci's "The Last Supper" hanging on the wall.

Another highlight of the show is a skull painted in 1997 by famed contemporary Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. "Black Kites" features a human skull covered in black geometric shapes. At the top of the skull are boxes, evenly drawn and spaced. As the head contours and recedes into sockets and holes, the boxes themselves shift and change in size to fit the new curves and forms.

Other young ‚migr‚ artists like British-born Melanie Smith, find workers for their projects at low cost. One of Smith's videos features two Mexican men creating a large room-sized web of multi-colored string. There is no apparent purpose for this exercise -- it just seems as if Smith was able to pay people to do what she asked and then taped it.

Upon leaving the exhibit, one can walk down to the lower gallery and observe the superficially refreshing bubble display. This instillation piece by Teresa Margolles entitled "En El Aire" appears to be light and cheerful -- that is, until one reads that the water used to produce the bubbles was taken from a morgue in Mexico and had been used to clean corpses. Thankfully, Margolles sterilized the water.

While this is a difficult way to leave the museum, it makes one think about the great realities facing Mexico and its citizens. A U.S. artist would never have had access to such water nor would he ever be able to use it in a public art exhibit. Made in Mexico is a powerful display of the dichotomies in Mexican society, between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots and the artists and their subject matter.