User:MexicanArt/sandbox

Video and Installation
As detailed by art critic Jean Fisher, Cuevas's performance piece Drunker (1995) presents substance abuse "as a means to 'obliterate’ the anguish of trauma, where the sufferer is caught between the compulsion to bear witness to the catastrophe and the impossibility of articulating it."

Cuevas’s solo exhibitions engage a variety of artistic forms, culminating in multisensory installations that, while operating in high art institutions, advocate public interventionism. Many of these contain specific visual and auditory allusions that generate social commentary. In particular, Cuevas’s Social Entomology, exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum in 2007, employs projected cellular and animal imagery, overlaid with a metaphorical orchestral soundtrack entitled Insect Concert, to remark on human societal structure and its exploitative relationship with the natural world. Critic Francis McKee explains the technological nature of Social Entomology as Cuevas’s evidence for modern humanity’s commodification of animals and the natural world.

In a text entitled “Corporatocracy, Democracy and Social Change (in Mexico and Beyond),” Cuevas co-authors a discourse on the contemporary dissonance between humanity and the natural world. Her remarks affirm her opposition to the anthropocentric attitude driving industrialization, which has historically occurred at the expense of indigenous and agrarian peoples. Moreover, initially explored in her Information/Misinformation billboard series, Cuevas’s thoughts on the communicative importance of “national rumor” in a modern age find footing in the written record of the Lier En Boog philosophy and art symposium Ljubljana: Information Strategies, in which she participated in 2002.

Sentiments of social activism are expressed in the digitized radio transmissions of Cuevas's Mejor Vida Corp, which, according to scholar Scott L. Braugh in an essay on Latina/Latino innovation in film and video, introduce an accessible voice that bypasses the Eurocentric conventions of corporate media and establishes a new mode of active communication with the Mexican working class. Additionally, MVC directly engages community welfare, providing free social services and distributing “international ID cards, subway tickets, and barcodes for grocery stores”—all examples of what art theorist Pamela M. Lee describes as “movement as a movement.”