Marina Cruz's second solo exhibition with Mind Set Art Center, Wear and Tear, features a series of 6 paintings in oil on canvas. The ar tist's fascination on garments continues to fabric's formal qualities such as texture, patterns, line, color and composition. She meditates on various art processes that best depict the clothes' various characteristics. The various dresses were discovered in her grandmother's closet, lovingly folded and set aside while exhibiting the wear and stains of time. The pieces, mostly dating half a century back to the 1950s and the 1960s, belong to two generations of women: worn by her grandmother, her mother and aunts during their childhood and youth.
The large paintings display the inside-out of the dresses, the surfaces touching the body. Cruz exposes the threads, folds, cuts, and stains by unique realistic strokes and an enlargement of the dress. By cropping her subject, enlarging and portraying a focused view of clothing, the artist abandons the form and shape of the dress in its entirety. Through painstakingly painting the subject mater in oil on canvas, she was able to give us an introspective space to contemplate on the material's imperfections that they have been aging over the years. Although paintings may show the simulated texture through light and shadow, the physical or tactile quality is more felt and evident in her small collograph prints. These prints are made from the imprints of different fabrics, showing simplicity in composition while emphasizing texture. Finally, Cruz also created fiberglass/resin sculptures casted from actual dress, which shows the inherent attribute of three dimensionality of the object, the actual size and space the object such as a tiny dress can occupy.
In this exhibition, Marina Cruz not just deconstructs the dresses' attributes, qualities and characteristics by using creative choice of ar t production; paintings, prints and sculptures, but also make us reflect on the inevitable "wear and tear" of the dress and its wearers.
