JOY RAY: a mirror with breath like stone
Museum of Art and History / MOAH:CEDAR • Lancaster CA • Sept-Nov 2023
Photos by Anna Pacheco
Time is an immortal thread. History is a vanishing world. Buildings are geologic remains. a mirror with breath like stone invokes the spectral aspects of built environments, using textiles, sculptures, and audio works to manifest what Joy Ray calls the “aesthetics of archival decay.”
Ray’s installation includes scratches and markings found on archival microfilm, historic images from the Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette, and audio sourced from vintage 78s.
Conjuring the layers of history that haunt contemporary life, a mirror with breath like stone channels the mysterious, invisible forces that permeate time and gives them temporary form.
“Astounding spiritual visual poetry. Magnificent.”
“In Ray’s constant research posture, to continually look and never find is everything.”
“In Ray’s domain, a highly developed example of systemized, artistic gameplay, things fall apart because we need to know what destruction looks like and how precisely we are destroyed, its pleasure.”
“The work indicates a knowing use of the physically and temporally illegible quality of archival materials, offering an unknowable abyss that somehow manages to be soft enough to invite embrace.”