Wendy Cabrera Rubio

Victory Through Air Power III (1943)

Victory Through Air Power III (1943) by Wendy Cabrera Rubio is part of a series of quilted maps that reproduce different scenes from the eponymous film. Victory Through Air Power the film is an animated history of aviation produced by Walt Disney, and likely one of the first educational and documentary films using animation. Disney’s political agenda, specifically towards Latin America, has played an important role in Cabrera’s practice. This work is not only representative of the artist’s research-based practice. As in many of her hand-crafted pieces combining schematic maps and landscapes with cartoon-like characters, Cabrera also questions traditional didactic displays as well as the exhibition apparatus by turning the art, its didactic labels and random spectator—an exotic bird keeping an eye on his bananas—into the props of a larger staged situation.

The series of works Cabrera produced in response to the film also takes inspiration from the six mural paintings that Mexican artist and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) painted on the occasion of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, titled Pageant of the Pacific. Rather than tracing a territory, Covarrubias’s mural paintings celebrated the cultures of the Pacific by putting forward the cultural and economic relations between continents in which the ocean played a major role. Following Covarrubias’s lead, Cabrera transposes his artistic and didactic exercises in anthropological mapping, to the concurrent historical context: the political map of World War II. As suggested by its title and its ideologically charged original referent, Victory Through Air Power III (1943) points to war propaganda against the Japanese as embodied by the supposed accessibility of popular culture and educational films.