Alinka Echeverría. Faith and Vision

The California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS block presents ‘Alinka Echeverría: Faith and Vision’, the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Echeverría’s work, equally engages the histories of fine art and documentary photography, and critically investigates the relationship between sight, belief and knowledge.

The exhibition features an immersive installation of 122 works from the artist’s celebrated series ‘The Road to Tepeyac’(2010), as well as work from her new project, ‘Deep Blindness’(2014). ‘Small Miracles’ (2012), which has been re-conceived as an outdoor public art installation, displayed on the façade of one of the buildings of UCR ARTS Block.

In ‘The Road to Tepeyac’, the artist explores the relationship between an invisible divine presence and its ritualized, material expression. Each year on her feast day of December 12th, as many as eight million faithful from all over Mexico (and beyond), set out on pilgrimage to Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City to honor the Virgin. According to centuries of belief, in 1531, her miraculous apparition imprinted itself onto the cloak of the indigenous man Juan Diego. Since then, devout Mexicans have felt privileged to have their land chosen for her manifestation. A symbol of unconditional love and protection, her image has a strong connection to that of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin. Displaying over one hundred varying depictions of the Virgin, Echeverría’s series observes each individual pilgrim on a personal spiritual journey, and probes the philosophical, psychological and socio-cultural connection between faith and image.

The CMP will also debut work from ‘Deep Blindness’, an ongoing project that questions the liabilities of the gaze through the absence of image. In particular, the artist is interested in the relation between seeing and knowing in the context of an image-centric belief structure. Through de-constructing the act of beholding the sacred “image of miracles, and the miracle of image”, Echeverria traces the production, (re)-presentation, and perception of image, and how it is embedded in language and code. Following the investigations of neuroscientist Oliver Sack’s work, in Deep Blindness, the Virgin is not present as an image but as a presence, in the mind’s eye of the spectators and encoded in the braille description of her apparition.

While the main gallery instills the overwhelming effect of her omnipresent representation, ‘Deep Blindness’ engages the audience in an experience the opposite. The installation of this video and sculptural piece offers a contemplative space in which there is an absence of image; a space that leads us to question the role of vision in systems of belief, be they religious or political.

The public display of ‘Small Miracles’ further probes the philosophical, psychological, and socio-cultural connection between materiality and faith. The series is a typology of twenty- four contemporary, manufactured votives called milagritos that are bought by pilgrims, then bestowed upon the miraculous Virgin of Juquila in Oaxaca. These works offer viewers an insight into the prayers and hopes of the faithful: for healing and health, love and safety.

All images: Alinka Echeverría, Tepeyac Series, 2010, © Alinka Echeverria, Courtesy of Gazelli Art House