Rubio's tongue-in-cheek comics and artworks bridge high culture with kitsch while exploring constructions of mixed-race identity.
There are events and images that have a direct connection with the past to the point that they are mistaken as contemporary, their time has been dislocated and the apparent stability of historical linearity disappears. Through her practice, Mexican artist Wendy Cabrera Rubio renders the temporal and narrative traces in which Mexican identity transits, a history marked by the creation of a nationalism whose fixation on an indigenous past wanders in the present. This book focuses on the construction of mestizaje and the differences between a "popular" art and a "cultured" art, because as the philosopher Bruno Latour would say, the relative existence of these experiences breaks the logic of a beginning and an end: no step is left to chance, contemporary existence, therefore, implies imagining different possible pasts.
Wendy Cabrera Rubio (born in 1993 in Mexico City) is part of a generation of artists that has been invested in revisiting the history of Mexican arts and crafts with a multidisciplinary and pedagogical approach. Her practice explores the production and distribution of images; using strategies such as appropriation and performance, Cabrera condenses high and low, arts and crafts, history and storytelling. Her work frequently consists of bi-dimensional and three-dimensional quilted objects, cartoon-like characters and/or landscapes made of felt, that stage different narratives (often as a puppet theater) influenced by the educational television programs from the first half of the 20th century. Among the recurrent topics in her work are the concept of the so-called Pan-American history and its relation to North American interventionism in Latin America as embodied by the cultural industries, particularly in Walt Disney's productions. In this vein, Cabrera's practice critically addresses the ideological aspects of identity politics.
