Holly Fay: Plain
Art Gallery of Regina 2003
Essay by Jack Anderson
Plain
All of Fay’s work here denies the traditional landscape paradigms by refusing specific, objective locators of reference points that might permit us to fix them in space and time, congealing tentatively – and often slipping away – into something resembling a landscape. Not responding to the details of a specific place so much as responding to our experiences of them, these paintings – really an agglomeration of numerous aesthetic signs from color to format to composition to the application of paint all collected together – all point to landscape painting as genre, while simultaneously forcing from us a sense of familiarity – of having been there.
Working in luminous oil paint and restricting her palette to rich muted earth colours, Fay builds up layers after layer of paint (working with a thicker paint surface here than in prior work), often on top of old canvases, fusing fresh colors and paint strokes with residual ones, in a process of painting and repainting that, in the end, obscures as much as it reveals. From the inside out to the outside in, this palimpsest reversely requires the viewer to move beyond obtuse and obscure surface atmospherics, to sift through adumbrated layers of paint and process, in a confounding search not only for recognition beyond descriptive facts of paint and brush stroke but in a search for meaning.
Plain consists of two separate bodies of work, one which seemingly depicts and locates the viewer at a distance within a space both familiar and understood; the other which seemingly depicts and locates the viewer within a less familiar space of uncertainty. While in descriptive terms (which assert physical reality), these paintings clearly consist of nothing more than paint on canvas, they induce beyond objectivity – beyond their physicality in the real world – proposing, in these particular configurations of physical elements, a shared emotional or psychological space beneath or within empiricism. Although Fay’s works are somehow familiar, she dissolves Cartesian certainly here, asking about phenomena – asking whether meaning is already present in this cipher-like language of colours, formats, applications of paint, etc., whether meaning is an agglomerate of them or whether we as viewers create meaning from them.
Fay interrogates perception and our perceptions of the world, looping between known and unknown. Our constantly equivocating readings here propel us from objectivity to subjectivity, from description to imagination: how is it that we understand the physical matter of these paintings to consequence something more than the sum of its parts?
Fay looks beyond or through analytical models of knowing the world which procedurally dissemble, specify and organize reality, instead implicating and privileging the experiential body, which as site of agency is home to lived experience of events and places rather than seen, permitting the world to be coded through and in it. And in this way images are less about place per se than bodily-inscribed memories of experiences of place. Not observed and descriptive images then, Fay forces recognition instead through painterly signs and painterly gestures that correspond to shared bodily presence in the landscape, shared body knowledge of the presence of landscape.
While seeming to resemble the world to us – while it seems this paint and canvas through some visual and psychological reactive response mechanism corresponds to our knowledge of the world – Fay’s work points way from realism and even further away from naturalism, which emphasizes the appearance of things. As images, these paintings in any and all terms are abstractions of the world, of experience, of memory. But what kind of mirror is this and what does it mirror?
Are these images screens on which we viewers project our experience? Recognize our experience? Feel our experience? As has already been stated, Fay’s work resembles the seen world asking questions related to perception and painting and specifically to the coded language of realism that regurgitates the seen world back to us. But more importantly, Fay probes here the nature of reality itself, asking how we know the world and what we know about it.
Although Fay’s stripped down featureless images are replete with the vocabulary of landscape painting, it is not insignificant that the two landscape models that Fay’s paintings most closely resemble both belong to mid 20th century formalism, a period/movement in which artists simultaneously tried to define and stay within the physical limits and defined languages of both paint and the painting while at the same time trying to suggest through the atmospherics of painterly illusionism a kind of deep space reality beyond the factual surface of the paint, one generated and operative within the mind itself. And in this regard it is almost impossible to disregard the visual and even conceptual correlation between the large square paintings she includes here and the 1960’s colour-field abstractions of Mark Rothko, whose large swatches of soft colour suggested sombre landscapes of the sublime; or between her smaller horizontal images which resonate with the early stripe paintings of Canadian landscapist Takao Tanabe. What is consonant in Fay’s work and theirs is the dialectic between the objective physical nature oh the painting (body) and its reading or meaning (mind).
But Fay does not simply reignite the constant painterly question of the relationship between surface and depth in her insistent use of landscape paradigms made so central in formalist painting, but more directs her interrogation into what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger identifies as consciousness, into manifesting ‘being-in-the-world’ rather than apart form it. Fay’s work hinges on questions of human consciousness then, proposing the hidden in the everyday, and asking by her manifestations of it whether awareness and knowledge are independent of the physical body of the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, key French phemenologist of the last century, insists that perception / reality is not mere sensation or a reaction to external stimulus but rather is informed by the mind which is conscious of itself: we cannot see without an awareness that we are within the world. As he states, “the body is the medium of things.” 1
As the “perceiving mind is an incarnated mind” 2 , we are conscious that Fay’s formless works (that indeed speak about formlessness) are not only Fay’s perceptions embodied - given form - through her bodily experience of place but of our own experiences as viewer’s who share this on some experiential level of awareness and knowing. They prompt us to ‘see’ - to perceive - these uncluttered and unfettered optical / real spaces via our own body memories of places.
Although rich in surface, Fay’s images while not exactly impoverished are physically brief; but conversely they are conceptually and psychologically expansive visual utterances, informed by a soft stillness that is somehow filled with formlessness, and - certainly in the case of the larger more atmospheric paintings - glowing with immanence. They are recognitions through both mind and body.
As viewers – as receivers and perceivers – we are compelled to ask if there is some essential meaning in these configurations of colour and paint that prompts and conveys some shared truth about the world, and about our understanding of it.
With no specific context forcing distinction, Fay’s paintings anticipate an affirmative answer. Fusing sensation with memory – body with mind – she paints to other perhaps gendered ways of knowing, neither conforming to nor reiterating science or objectivity. In our tentative response her nameless and shapeless images become mnemonics that kindle not just a shared recognition of nature but a shared recognition of other – of, in the end, both shared identity despite differences and of identity shared in difference.
1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
Jack Anderson
2003