Consuming Passions: The Video Art of Ximena Cuevas

In Consuming Passions, Seid considers Cuevas’s technique of fusing pastiche with diaristic self-presentation.  Cuevas’s work is presented as a mash-up that creates hybrid structures that blur the line between local and exotic.  This idea of blurring the divide between local and exotic is reiterated by Cuevas’s interest in consumer culture and the homogenizing and unifying effects of globalization.  Cuevas thereby presents an imitation of life, but one whose artificiality is in fact the operative logic of reality at large.  Cuevas explores this ambiguity, interrogating popular culture’s points of intrusion and erosion.