Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
Matter and Memory
by Beth Elaine Wilson

YIn what some time ago ironically became one of the most memorable short stories I’ve ever read, the spellbinding Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges described an individual known as Funes the Memorious. Thrown from a horse, he had suffered a head injury with the odd side-effect of granting him an infallible memory—from that moment on, he recalled every instant of every day with utter and complete clarity, and in infinite detail. Crippled by the accident, he sat on a cot in his room, read, spoke occasionally with visitors (such as the narrator of Borges’ story), and used this uncanny ability to learn four or five languages, reconstruct for himself entire days in his life moment by moment, and to perform other mental feats impossible for the rest of us ‘immemorious’ mortals.

But the sheer volume and precision of this miraculous memory presented major problems for Funes. As Borges’ narrator notes,

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog seen at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion.

The point of the story, for me, is the fact that memory is, at base, full of holes. Truncations, summaries, mis-remembered, and simply dropped details are part and parcel of the exercise of this faculty. Borges’ fantastic story brings home the complexity of real world minds. Memory is no simple mirror—if it were, it would lead us all to Funes’ disastrous end. (After only two years of this memoriousness, he passed away “of a pulmonary congestion,” prematurely ancient at the age of 21. I’m not sure I would have been able to last even that long in such a state.)

The paintings of Mary Black, now on view at the Gallery at R&F Encaustics in Kingston, roused in me the memory of Borges’ story. The works themselves are complex, abstract layerings of encaustic, embedded with occasional fragments of words or images, and the whole scraped, gouged, recovered, and gouged again. The expressive, flesh-like substance of the waxy medium preserves the memory of Black’s varied interventions on its surface, treatments which in the first place arise in her recollections and ruminations on images and events in her own life and her dreams, shaped in part by an interest in Jungian psychology.

The abstraction of these works leaves plenty of room for the viewer to supply his or her own reading(s) of each painting’s references. Between the Flesh and the Bones is composed of one large, rectangular panel divided into three equal vertical strips, two primarily white passages bookending a central black band. Across the top of this large panel a second, smaller one (also mostly black) has been centered and affixed horizontally, the ends of the panel jutting out an inch or two from the edges of the main field below. The black bands form a capital “T”, which immediately struck me as one of the variant forms of a crucifix. Given the expressionistic working of the surface of the painting, the deep scratches to layers of color buried within that brought out flecks of red, and the alluringly carnal visual texture of the encaustic itself, this reading seemed quite plausible. Speaking with the artist at the opening, however, she suggested that it might also be read as a kimono form—a different sort of abstract form applied to the human body, the flatness of the panels then registering the traditional planar display of the Japanese garment. Either reading works, and still others are likely possible: this indeterminacy is one of the grounding functions of Black’s work as a whole.

Black takes full advantage of many of the best qualities of the encaustic medium in this strong series of works. As I’ve already mentioned, the unique surface texture and fleshy presence enabled by the beeswax that carries and fixes the pigment provides an almost irresistible tactility to the work; beyond that, she foregrounds the alchemical, transformative quality inherent in the medium’s quick passage from liquid, melted color to solid, set wax by allowing the traces of her numerous passes over the work to remain immediately legible. There is an almost performative aspect evident in watching this process unfold, and it demands a certain degree of timing and critical judgment on the part of the artist to know when and where to intervene and when to simply stop.
One large painting comprising two large, square panels joined together presents a case study of the artist’s process. Let the Ball Come to You initially resisted Black’s efforts to make the two halves into a single work. The more she added, scratched into the surfaces, layered, and scraped some more, the more obstinately the panels insisted to her that they were two independent works. Almost at her wit’s end, she stumbled across an expression in a restaurant review (of all places) that made reference to the timing required of both waiters and baseball players: sometimes, you simply need to let the ball come to you. Shortly thereafter, she had a dream one night of vibrant, red trees, which she translated into a repeated pattern of abstracted, gestural red forms that finally brought the two panels into visual synchronization.

Black shared with me at the opening a great story about her accidental friendship with Mario Savio (founder of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the sixties), who had been her instructor in a remedial math class at Sonoma State when she belatedly went back to school to finish her degree. After striking up her acquaintance with him, she went to hear him give a lecture about his activism and his politics—and in it, he mentioned something about what happens “between the seeing and the doing.” This phrase jumped out at Black, who subsequently used it as the title of both a painting and an exhibition of her work. This nebulous area of transformation, the non-place where seeing prompts the vision of doing, is at the heart of her endeavor. And unlike Funes the Memorious, she has found a way of successfully expressing the nature of that gap, by finding a material way of “doing” that carries with it the memories of how it got there.