Memory/Reference: The Digital Photography of Martina Lopez at the Art Institute, through January 28
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A deeper contradiction lies at the heart of Promising the Past, 1. In the background is a cemetery filled with monuments, and many of them resemble the ornate pillar, which seems tied to the man’s power and position. This too undercuts his force; the three figures are themselves a bit like cemetery monuments. Time haunts all of Lopez’s images; several have cemeteries in the background–a kind of future for the figures we see, but a future that’s already in the past.
Lopez not only undercuts artistic conventions in her work but addresses issues of family and time. One of eight children of first-generation Mexican-Americans, she was a photo student when her father died in 1986. She turned to a family photo album then “to review the past,” as the exhibit booklet puts it. That album impressed her with the difference between her memories and the story told by the pictures. “I began to use the computer to create images that documented my own family history,” she says, but soon she started using “images from beyond my personal album as a way to create a collective history, one that would allow people to bring their own memories to my work.” (For the present composite photos, most about four feet wide, a lab made the final color prints from transparencies produced from Lopez’s computer disks.) Her work captures two essential qualities of the family album: its odor of the distant past and the sense of connection between its “characters.” The monochrome figures are clearly from old photos of people already dead, though occasionally other figures point to the future of the central characters. A family album is not only a record of the past, however. Every figure in Lopez’s photos is ensnared in a gigantic web–of landscape, of other people, of time. Their poses, expressions, and gestures never seem the free expressions of independent beings but markers on a grid of relationship and of time.
Rivers are often symbols of the passage of time, and the two bridal couples near the river in Heirs Come to Pass, 3 also evoke the idea of life as a journey, with marriage a key passage. Visually similar forms produce a different kind of unity. Mysterious silhouetted figures resemble the gnarled branches of a silhouetted tree nearby, recalling Max Ernst’s paintings of forests becoming beasts. These silhouetted figures and plant forms also start to resemble the irregular white clouds behind, and the striations in the land–the “flow” of the image makes it clear that each figure, however individual, is part of the same temporal journey. Figures disconnected in time and space begin to seem mysteriously linked, and the work movingly evokes Lopez’s central ideas: that every moment is connected to the future and past, and that time rules and eventually consumes us all.
