Biting retort to oppression
As satire, Kukuli Velarde’s work is both outraged and deliciously outrageous. The Peruvian-born, Philadelphia-based artist co-opts the forms of pre-Columbian ceramics to issue a postcolonial manifesto on identity and integrity. “Plunder Me, Baby” at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona is withering one moment, wacky the next and brilliant throughout.
A Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA sleeper, the show features two series of sculptures, a mixed-media wall piece and videos. It is also augmented by examples of the kind of pre-Columbian ceramics Velarde riffs on — effigy urns and spouted vessels with human or animal attributes and geometric patterning. Her versions are amped up, sexed up.
The series that gives the show its title amounts to a cunning counter-occupation. Velarde has inserted her own likeness where a more generalized human face or animal head would appear in her centuries-old models. In doing so, she asserts continuity with her indigenous roots and kicks back defiantly at the forces that oppressed, mischaracterized and dehumanized her ancestors. Her work emerges out of the psychic and cultural fallout that persists to the present.
Each of these mash-ups has taut energy, biting wit and a long, complex title starting with a slur in Quechua, some mocking descriptions in English and Spanish, and the date and culture of the particular piece that served as the artist’s springboard.
The other series of sculptures are all based on a single 16th century Mesoamerican piece in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Velarde retains the general posture of the thick, squatting, 13-inchhigh figure with its arms raised by its side, but she enlarges it to roughly 2 feet tall, transposing male features to female. She also varies the glaze, coloration and embellishment of each of the five pieces installed as a group here, extracted from a series numbering more than 70.
The AMOCA show, a snappy jolt of historical remediation, makes that message urgently clear.