JOY RAY: POEMS FOR FUTURE ARCHEOLOGISTS
by Shana Nys Dambrot
We often wonder how the future will see us. We ponder the wild magic of cave paintings, hieroglyphs, runes, and inscrutable symbols carved into remote stone cliffs; and from the perspective of modern life we think about what our descendants or even interplanetary visitors might come to learn about our lives when we too have become a “lost” civilization.
Painter Joy Ray’s alchemical, masonic process layers pigment and sand on rough textile, along with rusted metal and laid-in wool, punk rock flavored needlework and the linear, almost pictographic scars of cross-stitch. A dark romance of haute punk and tribal goth is expressed in the symphonics of black pigments whose diverse textures, reflections, absorptions and low-pile topographies enliven the canvases with the energy of dark clouds against an ebony sky. The fractal pooling of drips and washes, the flecks of rust on constellations of obsolete metals, the visceral tug at the puncturing edge of thread, all combine to create a necro-cosmos of fossils and forces that flirts with a deeper organic consciousness.
A dark romance of haute punk and tribal goth is expressed in the symphonics of black pigments.
The prominence of stitching as a form of mark-making in Ray’s compositions highlights the aspects of her practice most engaged with textile. There are twin histories surrounding the use of fabrics in art, some purely aesthetic or material-driven and some referential of traditional craft and/or gendered genres. While for Ray some of that is operative, her work exists more firmly within the broader realm of painting, with stylistic ancestors in AbEx and arte povera, as well as post-minimalists like Ad Reinhart, proponents of inventive mixed media augmentations like Antoni Tàpies and Anselm Kiefer, lovers of lavish paint application like Jay DeFeo, and communication with sculptural, skin and bones monsters and myth-makers like Lee Bontecou and Robert Rauschenberg.
Deliciously geological, evoking stone and lichen and the battering of eons of rainfall as surely as the fabric stitches evoke surgery and violent repair.
Ray’s appreciation for the spectacular entropic and eternal personality of sand, rust, plaster, and earth infuses her paintings with an immediate aura of decay, as though they were 1000 years old at the moment they were born. This effect is deliciously geological, evoking stone and lichen and the battering of eons of rainfall as surely as the fabric stitches evoke surgery and violent repair.
To this multiplicity of organic foundations, Ray introduces more specific, less abstract mark-making, in the form of an encoded “written” lexicon, which is both intuitively a language and indecipherable to the casual viewer. Ray’s work does in fact contain encrypted messages across the past, present, and future. No spoilers, but a lot of it depends on what the viewers themselves need to see in that experience. In this way, the work’s materiality merges with its symbolism to build fascinating hybrids of form and spirit, touching on art history and archeology, mystery and memory, insight and imagination.
June 2020