Notes from Abstraction
and Solid Universe Theory: An Artist Talk given at DaVinci Art Alliance,
Philadelphia, PA by artist Martha Hope Carey / November 28, 2018
I wondered about what you need to have in place in
your mind to believe that the universe is solid rather than what it is - which
is pretty much empty space and things we can’t fully describe yet. I read a science
fiction short story a few years ago that explores the impact of this belief
being shattered. The beings in this story discover, using technology they developed,
that the universe they believed or “knew” was solid (which they based their
philosophies, their physics, their predictions on) was, in fact, not. They actually existed in a pocket of space
within a solid sphere which was afloat in our universe. Which, mostly empty space
and mysteries.
Both ends of that are fascinating to me: the systems
and strategies we use to define and refine the universes we exist in, mentally
and emotionally; the changes that happen when perception changes; reactions to
traumatic change; what kinds of things push accepted thinking to new levels;
how resistant we can often be to stark realities.
And it made me think about seeing. I mean, before glass
was ground and used in eyeglasses, every person on earth who had any visual
impairment short of blindness saw the objects in the real world around us as
reality. The way they saw things, however distorted by nearsightedness or
astigmatism, was the way those things were.
For them. Before the microscope showed otherwise, there was, in the Western
world, a belief that each thing in the natural world was symmetrical – had been
made that way, in fact. But, nope.
The moment we are living in now, in the U.S., we are
being led by a person who sees solidity where there it in fact empty space, and
whose nearsightedness has him continually describing objects of all kinds in a
distorted manner. And this is disconcerting and enraging and absolutely a call
to anyone who can see clearly to challenge this.
Those were some of the thoughts I’ve been having,
putting together the paintings in my recent show Solid Universe Theory.
Because abstraction itself is a challenge to any solid
universe thinking.
I have been painting for 17 years now. Always
abstraction, no “phases.” Canvasses are resilient planes onto and into which I
extend my ideas, reactions, history, body, feelings, mind. It comes naturally
to me to do this. And it feels like the opposite of many other things. By which
I mean, much of life is figuring out strategies that gain one a sense of
satisfaction or clarity in relation to others. Encounters with new people, for
example: we “place” them, they remind us, they sound or look like, we go along
with or against their identity or energy. All the time. We take in knowledge
using strategies that satisfy, too. Ways of learning.
During the last 17 years of painting, I also got a PhD
– not in art. My dissertation work was ethnographic research in a school, where
I was learning how a group of teachers made shared meaning of an experience.
The work they did to make sense of things, and the work I did to make sense of
their processes, involved lots of strategies, to get to a point of
satisfaction. This is common sensical, since we are all contingent, and
knowledge is as well.
Abstraction, to me, is…not that.
When I paint, I get to the edge of that plane in front
of me and my brain must open, and suspend, in a way. I must get to a tense and
aware place – or I am in that place and then grab a canvas – where it’s as if
the unconscious habits of mind are like big airport automatic doors, but intentionally
stalled open.
What does that do?
I stop having strategies. I stop seeking for something
that is contingent to be satisfied. I am not social or engaged or thinking
about another person. I barely think about my body.
That tension is fuel. I work and shift and move and
drag and pull and grab tools and work and work. There is no representational
aim, since I am not thinking about strategies that may make things recognizable
for anyone (including brush strokes or styles). There is no recognition. My
mind is the stalled-open door for as long as I am in the work, and frankly,
every time I look at the work from there on.
Which is abstraction.
When one looks at an abstract painting, the viewer is
pulled in, sometimes by color as a trigger or a feeling, but the viewer uses
strategies to immediately find the familiar and…finds none, and so creates
some, and tries to apply them, but there is no place for anything to rest.
So, you try again – is that an object in there? I see
a window! Maybe a train track. An aerial map? But those things are not there.
And if you stay
in engagement with abstraction, you wear out your strategies, eventually. Which
means the possibility is there for you to bust through the solid universe, and
out into the real one, which is lots of empty space and things we don’t have
words for yet.
In that moment, you get a view of the capacity of your
own mind.
For some people this can be very uncomfortable. After
all, there is a lot of space and unknowable stuff in there, too. And in my
opinion as a human and an artist, that is glorious.
The titles of my paintings are markers, for me, markers
of what the thing was that activated the weird tension, that made the doors stall
open. And it is never a question that does this.
Questions are strategies to
get to satisfaction. It is, rather, just a moment of comprehension about things I can
never fully understand or even imagine clearly – like what thoughts and
visions one would have, to get to the point where you could conceive of sending
a probe into space to take photos of the moons of Saturn. This has been done, which
is fantastic, but holy shit, the creative thought and acts of imagination that
went into making that happen. To strive and build and plan a way to capture
images of objects which reside so far out in space that no human in our
lifetime will ever see with their own eyes.
That is an achievement of mind that awes me. The vast
leaps of thought that had to be taken to even imagine maybe, and then if, and
then yes, and then how. And to take those leaps for the
sole reason of expanding the known, for the benefit of all of us. Remarkable.
Abstraction allows me to stay in that tense, aware,
and in this case, amazed moment of awe.
It is glorious.
It works my mind. And I paint.
