In her recent exhibition at Museo Tamayo, Valeska Soares (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1957; Soares currently lives and works in New York) returned to two of the most significant themes in her recent production: gardens and mirrors. Soares was invited to inaugurate the Intersticios program of site-specific works in the forest that surrounds the museum, and attentive to the demands of space and situation, she chose an area that, as she put it, “wanted this piece."¹ The artist used reflective acrylic sheets to build a “lake” nearly forty meters in diameter. Her site was a clearing in the woods from which a path ran to one of the museum’s glass doors —which in turn reflected the architectural space of the building’s façade and formed the entrance to the work. During the rainy season, a giant puddle forms in this clearing, and this becomes Soares’s guiding concept. The lake’s amoeba-like shape was dictated by the outline defined by the trees themselves. It creates a new element in the landscape which to a large degree adds a touch of artificiality to the found situation, and as part of it creates this new and temporary piece.
A more dramatic element based on different specificity—in this case, Mexican culture—is added to the “ambient” character of this project. A small glass arbor was built in one of the lake’s extremes, and inside this arbor, a large cake was hidden; the cake had the measurements and characteristics of a bed. The gigantic dessert was specially ordered by the artist from one of Mexico City’s most traditional pastry shops, Pastelería Ideal; its entire preparation and baking were supervised by Soares, who also intends to publish a series of works using her record of the process. The use of such iconography refers to cultural celebrations and to Mexican women’s initiation rituals, such as the quinceañera or the traditional wedding. The bed was hyper-realistically rendered, with sugar capitonées, pillows, and borders. Its presence within the glass bubble contributed a disturbing element to the piece introducing a bed on which no one can lie, and a bed cake that no one can eat—and would only be seen through the glass. The work’s ephemeral profile denotes, in that fleeting consciousness, a hybrid form that borrows material and spiritual elements from both objects in order to fuse them into a third one, without a clearly defined material status. Perhaps its fate is to become food for the garden’s ants, in the manner of Sin título (Preserva), a 1991 sculpture by Soares, made with red roses wrapped in cotton that with time rotted away and was eaten by insects. We see it not only as a human construction invented for the purpose of containing nature and representing the landscape but also as an autonomous microcosm, its relationships of scale altered to accommodate insects. This disarticulation brings us to the concept of antropofugismo.²
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