As a Latina conceptual artist, Celia Alvarez Muñoz’s work sits at the intersection of feminism and collective remembrance, inviting a detour into the bicultural landscape of Mexican American autobiography. Enlightenment #4 reflects her bilingual upbringing in a border city and asks how feminism must be positioned across languages and cultural representations.

In Which Came First? Enlightenment #4 (1982), a five-part photo-diegesis, a row of five eggs is first seen end to end in descending perspective, and then, through the other photos, a progressively adjusting angle of vision across the five images ends at a view of the eggs side by side. The changing insight gathered by the viewer in consideration of the shifting photos follows the gradual revelations as experienced by grade-school-aged Álvarez Muñoz in a dual pursuit of understanding English and chickens. These twins of inquiry are introduced in the first of five coeval captions, such as “How does a chicken lay an egg?,” which accompany the photos. Underneath each caption, a cursive text written in pencil on a page from a Big Chief tablet conjugates the verb “lay.” The cursive counterparts are meant to be proxies for Muñoz’s work in elementary school and were made by the artist’s son, conveniently at the right age when the piece was produced. “Conveniently” is just a word of convenience, as it was perhaps her child’s arrival at that age that informed her process when conceiving the piece.
One caption features a falsehood told by a teacher as a correction for the child’s misuse of the word “lie.” Álvarez Muñoz’s response to the teacher’s overly modest fib is to hold vigil on the chickens, waiting to see eggs coming out of their mouths. Of course, the lessons of the day are that they don’t, and that authority figures may lay eggs with their attempts to shade the truth.

The five eggs seen side by side in the final photo seem to mutely offer the simultaneous mystery of likeness and variation, with the simplicity of a camera merely recording what is, though the configuration of the eggs by size to mimic the perspective of the initial image alters this “truth.” The suggestion of the Uncertainty Principle is equally mute, but no less present.