Familiar with Defamiliarization: Marina Cruz’s Material Maternal

Familiar with Defamiliarization: Marina Cruz’s Material Maternal

Translated by William Dirks

"Everyone is born in loss."  —Iris Marion Young [1]

"For what you really collect is always yourself."  —Jean Baudrillard [2]

For around ten years, Marina Cruz has produced mixed media explorations in modes ranging from oil painting, sculpture, photography, and text to embroidery and installations. But in each of these forms, she has maintained a focus on the central themes of life and family memory. Her current collection, Material Maternal, examines the overlapping and sometimes indistinguishable flows of time in the memories of those who are simultaneously daughter, mother, and woman. Cruz retraces, through articles of clothing left by elder family members, both the course of family history and her own personal experience, and through these exquisite and poetic works, she newly encounters her mother, aunt, and grandmother.

The special relationship between mother and daughter grows from more than a sense of shared gender. Mother and daughter project on each other their sense of the eras they inhabit, the growth and decline of the family, and their own personal experience of growth. As their lives intersect and interact in this relationship, the daughter becomes for the mother a kind of newly-born self, a reincarnation or re-embodiment through which she can re-experience her own childhood, and the daughter is subconsciously influenced, emulating her mother or internalizing her identification with her until one day she becomes a mother herself. In First Cast: Mother, Cruz takes a little girl's dress as the point of connection, symbolizing the special intersection of mothers' and daughters' lives. The work embodies the transformations between mother, daughter, and woman, the reflection of the other's life in oneself, and the sometimes contradictory weave of love and conflict between them.

The Warmth of Woven Garments

These items of clothing, collected and kept for so long, are hand-sewn children's garments originally made specially by Cruz's maternal grandmother for her mother and maternal aunt. As the years went by and those children grew into adults, the clothes were not discarded, but were kept in the family's chests and wardrobes. The artist once again spreads out these garments, wrinkled by long storage, portraying their textures and decorative patterns in her fine brushwork and elegant lines. Her detailed, unhurried presentation gives glimpses of a mother's state of mind, in the way she will dote on her children and maintain a sentimental attachment to such items even after they are grown.

Interpreting the meanings connected with clothing often involves exploring social and cultural signs and symbols, for which there is an established context and history; implicit in clothing are the customs and manners of a particular region, and their associations with class, gender, and historical era. The woven fabrics of our clothing become a symbol or a metaphor for the body itself. If our first skin is indicative of our race and our bloodline, then our second skin, our clothing, has a greater function than simply fending off wind and rain: this second skin encases the warmth of our bodies, reflects the lines of our movements, and carries the memory of different experiences. For that reason, in these paintings of children's garments hand-sewn by Cruz's grandmother, the visual interest lies not so much in their different patterns or styles, but in their ability to imply or to reveal moments of actual life, forming a chain of memory between three generations of women in the family and a point of intersection in their genealogy.

In the details of these paintings, we see the grandmother's clever choices of pattern and color, the way she carefully cut the garments, picking matching colors for cuffs and buttons, and her fine stitching and pressure creases—details that, so carefully depicted by the artist, display the love that flows from a mother's heart. In other ways, these clothes project a sense of time's passage: mended patches that themselves are now worn, threads peeling away from the seams, mold spots from being folded and boxed, stains that wouldn't wash out, and signs of fading. Like the growth rings in trees, these details accrete with the passing seasons and become traces that record life's experiences.

The Paths of Memory

The past circumstances of our memories intrude into the spaces of our real lives, and past events, passing through space and time, evoke a range of responses in viewers. On the relationship between looking and memory, John Berger said, "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves."[3] Cruz's work depicts the styles and patterns of these garments, the color and sheen of their fabrics, hinting at the various materials used and the changing temperatures of the seasons in which they would be worn. Their fine, spreading folds and seams wind across the picture space like rivers and mountain chains, rising and falling, crossing different plains under different seasons, evoking sensations once felt by the viewers themselves. The dress in Cruz's Bright but Broken Petals, adorned with flowers in various pastel shades above a ground of light blue, contrasts with the warm, spring-like, breezy feel of the garment in Sunny Dress for Sunny Weather, with its wildly spreading blooms. Appealing motifs of bicycles, tricycles, and animals spread across the dress in Checkered Moment with Mended Patches, full of bright color and the liveliness of childhood. Checkered Moment forms a multi-layered, intertextual narrative, as childhood memories and images begin to surface, and the string of moments from Cruz's life journey presented in the exhibition space mingles with viewers' own life experiences.

As Cruz presents the details of these fabrics, retracing her own past, she simultaneously provides viewers a unique path for the discovery of memories: we've all had a piece of clothing such as this. Maybe a grey-brown, long-sleeved item that we'd slip on, morning and evening, when the autumn winds started to blow; or else it was that little olive-green jacket that we were scolded into wearing when winter came. Or maybe it was that little dress we loved, that we wore until it was faded and worn to threads, the one that even then we still couldn't bear to give up. From the stains that countless washings couldn't remove, we dimly recall how we accidently got that spot of sauce, or how we carelessly sloshed that fruit juice onto our clothes—as well as the extra inches that were left for us to grow into, and how the clothes would be mended again after they finally fit us. We are reminded, too, by the signs of friction around the repeated mends that our families may not have been the most well off, as our mothers ran a thrifty household, lovingly tending to these matters.

It's as if we can see our mother's gestures and rhythms as she folds, compresses, then gathers up and bundles these clothes again and again, season after season, year after year. Even if those seasons of our lives will never return, we can, in our memories, return to them again and again.

Defamiliarizing the Familiar

This exhibition of Marina Cruz's work at the Mind Set Art Center includes ten oil works depicting the fabrics of garments. Cruz deliberately enlarges their scale, her compositions focusing on partial views such that, rather than the entire cut of the garment, we see instead a series of intense close-ups. Her realist painting techniques present fabric patterns with startling clarity and magnified detail, producing something like the visual flatness of fabric specimens or compressed planar views. As our eyes take in typically overlooked details, these daily items no longer seem like routine parts of daily life; familiar articles and materials instead become symbols or metaphors. Our gaze escapes from the space of the painting and we enter a stream of consciousness, as these finely detailed folds and wrinkles present something different from our usual experience of such images: these are not images of soft, fluffy new clothes.

Through defamiliarization, the artist draws the viewer away from the familiar daily context of such items. The garments become a series of overlapping symbols, strangely paradoxical in their simultaneous nearness and distance from us. In Cruz's Personal Archive I and II and her Pink Crib and Pink Cabinets, the household spaces of her memory seem frozen in time. Clothing folded for storage becomes part of the furniture, and childhood homewear takes on a different inflection: transformed into an abstract idea rather than scenes from past memories, we associate our own experience with what we see in Cruz's work, which returns us again to actual scenes of home life. These layers upon layers of clothing, miscellaneous items, and furniture rearrange themselves into new layers of memory. As we gaze at them and reflect, two separate streams of memory, temporo-spatial memory and physical, bodily memory, internal and external, weave together and pass through us.

The aesthetic concept of "defamiliarization" was first put forward in the early 20th century by Russian scholar Victor Shklovsky. Initially meaning to "make something strange," it emphasized the ways that beauty may result when we remove ourselves to an appropriate distance from overly familiar sensations and perceptions. If "familiar" means our most intimate sensory experiences, then "unfamiliar" means the alienation that follows familiarity. "Defamiliarization" does not mean non-perceptual or non-conscious, but rather is the means by which the artist produces new insights and associations: taking advantage of the gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or even through deliberately abnormal states, she seeks to enhance the viewer's insight and experience by stimulating the sense of visual beauty so often dulled by our daily lives. If the period of time in which we move between the two points of familiar and unfamiliar is lengthened, it produces a kind of tension, a tension which is not just an aesthetic viewpoint but is, in its own way, a state of being.

Viewing the childhood garments presented here will certainly spark curiosity about the stories behind these exquisitely portrayed garments, marked everywhere with time's passage, and how they were once worn. We can almost hear our mother (or one of our grandmothers) humming a children's tune, or that story that was repeated over and over, or something about the daydreams we once had as a child. In the movement between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the artist's look at the past mingles with the viewer's memories; by presenting familiar objects in an unfamiliar way, the artist creates unreality out of memory (which was once reality), then re-injects it back into our present reality.

Life as a child isn't always full of laughter, yet when all we have left is our ability to reminisce, and to evoke the past through art, it comes to seem like an irreplaceable period of good times. A bright, colorful, and beautiful time in our lives.

Gazing at these works evokes memories, and love. Enlarging these garments' details helps to slow the rhythms of our remembering, and in a kind of freeze-frame visual language, we meet not just the images and their accompanying aura, but an encapsulation of the circumstances surrounding them. If, as suggested by the theories of philosopher Henri Bergson, time is indivisible, and each moment is unique, then what exactly is "remembered time"? As we focus our gaze and meditate, thoughts and impressions stimulated by our senses emerge and coalesce, ultimately capturing for us the transient memory of a single moment. Remembering, then, calls on memory to evoke and reproduce a time that once elapsed in a particular space, and the experiences and feelings we underwent during that past time. Memory cannot reproduce the past, but through art such as this, we can gaze at the past, as it gazes back at us; we can regenerate it and coexist with it—with these memories that have been folded and folded again, and then, once more, spread open in front of us.