Maria Martínez-Cañas: Art_Latin_America The Davis

By Julia P. Herzberg

Over three decades, the conceptual photographer Maria Martínez-Cañas has produced several [1 ] extraordinary series of works in a wide variety of mediums and printing techniques. The Black Totems and Imagen Escrita (Written Image) series, together with earlier works, are singularly notable for their unusual and innovative compositional constructions and their intensive filmic research. Fundamental to the artist's photographic endeavor is her identity as a Cuban exile of Spanish ancestry and her ongoing negotiations as a Cuban American.[2] Equally important to her research and thinking are issues related to history, whether it be political, anthropological, botanical, colonial, or contemporary; territory; memories; family stories; and, ultimately, the creative imagination.

Black Totems II, Ill, and IV are unique works from a series that engages in an explicit dialogue with the paintings of Wifredo Lam. The famous Cuban modernist's contributions to world art are defined by a lifetime of production grounded in Cubism and Surrealism, together with his particular adaptations and transformations of motifs taken from Afro-Cuban folklore, religious practices. and cultural symbols. This was an iconography familiar to Martínez-Cañas throughout her life; around 1988-89, she decided to respond to a series of totemic paintings Lam had created in 1957, specifically Reflections of Water and Towards the Moon, both of which were illustrated in Max-Pol Fouchet's monograph on the artist.[3]

Martínez-Cañas views totems as objects that tell stories. In adopting the totem form, she retained the central sugar cane shaft that structured Lam's own totems. but transformed the spiky half-moons. the horizontal and curved spines, and the specific Afro-Cuban motifs into a complex ordering of black and white design elements with embedded photographic fragments. To create these complex photomontages, she first used an X-Acto knife to cut a template onto a 54 x 10-inch sheet of masking film known as Rubylith: two layers of film sandwiched together, one clear and the other a translucent ruby red color. Then, she inserted fragments selected from hundreds of black and white negatives that she had taken at the Maya site of Chichen ltza in Mexico and in Oak Creek Canyon in the Sedona Desert of Arizona. The artist then contact printed them onto gelatin silver mural photographic paper.

When looked at closely, Black Totem II is constructed mostly from images of the Sedona Desert, but as one descends, cacti give way to tombstones in a cemetery and finally to the structure known as La Iglesia at Chichen ltza. Black Totem Ill features a wall with carved skulls in relief, the flipped image of a reclining Chac Mool figure, three barely visible fragmented images of stairs, a standing figure, and a serpent's head. Some images are repeated in Black Totem IV, along with other Maya sculptures and details of columns from the Temple of the Warriors. In all three of these works, images are perfectly positioned within the totem to suggest mystery and discovery.

Imagen Escrita IV and VI (cat. 11 and 12) are, as the titles suggest, "written images," printed using the platinum/palladium process on antique papers that consist of original insurance forms for the exchange of goods between Spain and Cuba, evidenced by a woodcut of a sailing ship. The imagery juxtaposes map-like boundaries, rivers, and margins, with references to both the colonial and ancient past, including the grounds around a pyramid in Chichen ltza and different Pre-Columbian objects, like a mask from Teotihuacan. The sepia-toned ink handwriting on the manuscripts has changed color over time, giving a beautiful, dazzling tonal quality to the surface. In the Black Totems, Martínez-Cañas found a configuration to address history through archaeological sites and territories, thereby giving them an unexpected presence. In the later series, the original nineteenth-century texts and images converge with the artist's new ones, readdressing aspects of colonial history.

—Julia P. Herzberg

notes

1. These include silver gelatin prints, platinum and palladium prints, photogravures, and diazotypes.

2. See the chronology on artist’s Website: www.maríamartinez- Canas.com. For a discussion of the artist’s relationship to her Cuban identity, see Andy Grundberg, “A Storm of Images Photographs of María Martínez-Cañas,” in María Martínez-Cañas (Fort Lauderdale: Museum of Art, 2002), n.p.

3. Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1976), 238 (figs. 458 and 461).

This essay was published as an entry for the exhibition catalogue Art_ Latin_America: Against the Survey (pp. 42, 43, 168, 169). The catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from February 7-June 9, 2019. The exhibition catalogue was edited by James Oles with Lisa Fischman and published by University of Texas Press, 2019. ISBN978-1-4773-1909-3.

The Contents page lists the thematic categories of the exhibition: María Martínez-Cañas’ five photographs together with my entry are found under SAINTS AND RITIUALS. None of the entries on the artists have titles, therefore my original descriptive title “María Martínez-Cañas: Black Totems and Imágen Escrita” does not appear.

Photos @ María Martinez-Cañas