Review of Emily's Boxes
Excerpted from Jennie Klein, "Circumventing the Center, Identity Politics and Marginalization,"
New Art Examiner22:4 12-19, 52.

In spite of the plethora of simplistic exhibitions purporting to deal with identities, it is essential that artists exploring the border/margins continue to make work that challenges our complacent notions of fixed and unchanging identities. Emily Hicks, who is a performance artist as well as a critic and English professor, has recently put together a multimedia piece that addresses the ways discourses on gender and feminism have been marginalized in discussion of border art. "Emily's Boxes" comprises an artist's book based on "Love and Rockets" graphic novels/comics, a vargueno (writing desk) entitled The Hermeneutic Music Box, a collection of 14 antique boxes, and a computer-generated sound system based on the 94 languages spoken in Los Angeles. In the performance that accompanies "Emily's Boxes," Hicks' character, La Marquesa Casati, attempts to cross the border--both the literal United States-Mexico border and the metaphorical border of lust--by calling on her comadres, the members of the activist border arts group Las Comaderes, which has since disbanded. "Emily's Boxes" is a messy, non-linear narrative that relies heavily on storytelling and autobiography. At one point, La Marquesa Casati goes on Prozac, as did Hicks.

Hicks's recent critical work has used the figure of the Chicana lesbian as a trope for the border subject, and "Emily's Boxes" may be read as a sort of lesbian love poem to the other members of Las Comadres, as well as a requiem that marks the disbanding of the group. The piece derives from a fictionalized (or not-so-fictionalized) account of a group of feminist workers whose identities are constructed in part by their proximity to the border. It is less a condemnation of the opprssive Anglo cutlure at the border of two countries than it is about the difficulties of a group of women from different class, race, ethnic, educational, adn gender backgrounds working together to produce art about the border. A piece like "Emily's Boxes, " with its thoughtful, multivalent treatment of border issues, would have enhanced any of the recent shows on the topic. It remains to be seen whether such exhibitions about identityand culture continue to be largely up[roductive reifications of cultural essentialism, or whether there will be room for work that not only addresses issues of cultural identities and their construction, but challenges our very notion of by whom and for whom they are formed.