december fotoplay : gallery 8

Gallery 8 of the December Fotoplay cards is filled with works that share a sense of playfulness, with form and composition, and also in exploring the idea of identity.

The work above was sent to me by my friend Maya, who I met at the Visual Studies Workshop in the summer of 1986. Maya sent me the following email to explain her work: Hello Marcie, I have to be honest with you. When I first opened your card I thought it was annoying. Like once again, we’re being asked to make art for free. So I let it sit on the table for a couple of weeks staring out at me. And then I felt guilty for not just making something excellent. So I decided to make something, and also take a break from being so damn narcissistic. What you see is my homage to photographers’ works that, through the years, have knocked my socks off: Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Keith Carter, Sally Mann, Weegee, Dorothea Lange, Cartier Bresson. Ohhhhh… And look whose work is in the middle! It’s yours Marcie. You know how I feel about your Illuminating the Negative series. xoxo Maya   {For obvious reasons I felt a bit embarrassed by the idea of posting this work, but I decided I had to because it is so excellent.}

The work above came to me in two parts: there was a text document that contained the word find on the left, and a jpeg with the image on the right. The subject line of the email was “Fotoplay : Looking out, looking in.” I printed out the word find and started looking for words. As you see, I circled a bunch of words, and a couple of phrases (be soft, look within, let go). I’m not sure if I found all of the words in the puzzle because our friend John, who created this piece didn’t include a list! But I think I got the gist of what he was trying to say. Thank you, dear John…

The next card was created by my son Noah. For a couple of months, Noah has been swimming in a sea of college applications, tending to a million details – essays, transcripts, SAT scores, audition CDs– and feeling way too much pressure in the process. So yesterday he came into my studio and asked to make a card to relieve some of the stress. About five minutes later, he handed me the optical illusion card below, which he made by cutting out the figure, flipping it over, and gluing it to a piece of black construction paper

I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened the email that contained the curious work below. Aside from a “Happy Holidays” note, there was no explanation. So I searched for the phone number of the creator, my old neighbor Kate, and I called her at her home in California.

Kate told me it would be OK for me to share the story of her work, which by the end of her our conversation, she decided to call “Phoenix from the Pyre of the Past.” Kate is in the beginning of what she reluctantly called a mid-life crisis. She is newly divorced, after a twenty-five year marriage, which produced two children, now away in college. Alone in her house for the first time, Kate began cleaning out closets, the basement and the attic. Which is where she found the photo album given to her by her great grandmother, but long forgotten. (My Fotoplay card arrived in her mailbox on the exact same day of this photo album re-discovery.)

Kate got lost in the faces of her ancestors, and found what she called “great solace” in their steady gazes. She found a sense of connection to her past that she had never quite felt before, and she found an “ineffable strength” in studying the faces of her relatives, these “infinitely unique yet related-to-me people.”

Kate told me that when she turned the last page of the album, a string of old, fragile, but still connected paper dolls came tumbling out. At that moment, she envisioned the piece she would make (the piece above), which she tells me became the first of a now small collection of works about her “new-found old family.”