Xipe Totec (en los Banos de Tacobaya)

Oweena Camille Fogarty

This image was illustrated on the front page of San Francisco Arts Monthly, September 1991, Vol. 2, No. 6, with a review by Walter Lee who described her work as "...both erotic and confrontational".

"Xipe Totec" was the Aztec/Toltec god of agricultural renewal. Worshipped with human sacrifice, his priests wore the victims' skins as ceremonial attire. Aztec writings say Xipe Totec removed his own skin in order to provide food for humanity, the way a maize kernel loses its protective outer layer before sprouting. The subject was photographed in the baths near the Tacubaya subway in Mexico City.

Oweena Camille Fogarty commented to the gallery about her work: "My doctorate was connected to magical-religious processes in Afro-Cuban Crossed-Spiritism from an aesthetic point of view, working from a theoretical standpoint on collective memory and its transmission in the construction of altars.

All the work you have is based on magic realism, taken from religious references in Mexico from 1980- 1996. In 1992, after working for almost 10 years with artistic groups in Mexico, I decided I needed to understand more about primary cultures and both Mexico and Cuba preserve cultures of great "traditions", I disappeared from the artistic scene from 1996-2002."