JOY RAY
book of myths
Reimagined Poetry Invitational
Redondo Pier, Horizon Gallery
121 W. Torrance Blvd, Redondo Beach CA
Opens Friday June 6, 6-9pm
On view June 7-8, 13-15, 20-22, 1-7pm
“the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth”
In 2023, artist Joy Ray relocated from a remote tropical island to Lincoln Heights, a gritty urban neighborhood where multiple freeways converge near downtown Los Angeles. Her experience of the ocean, once a daily part of her life, became distant and hallucinatory, increasingly informed by memory and imagination. Ray investigates this psychological-sensorial shift in a new body of work.
Ray’s new textile sculptures represent significant developments in her practice. Here, she leaves behind her previous black and white rectangular weavings for fluid, jutting textile assemblages in a brilliant swimming pool blue. These soft sculptures curl and hang, hogtied and splayed, languid and unsettling. They are shapeshifters, evoking images and meanings that refuse to linger or resolve, like flashes from a barely-remembered dream. The forms appear both seductive and dismembered, piscine and metallic, invitingly tactile and disturbingly alien. Mounted on razor-sharp fish hooks and fishing line, and accompanied by audio interventions, the installation suggests a parafictional environment that is part natural history museum, scientific laboratory, and abattoir.
Across the surfaces of these works Ray has painted fragments of text from Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem, “Diving into the Wreck.” This work posits the ocean as an altered state of consciousness where identities, genders and even species blur and multiply. These menacing and ambiguous waters reveal more profound realities: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”Like Rich’s poem, Ray’s sculptures consider what it means to descend into an unknown abyss, to discover lost histories, and to confront the aftermath of violence.
Entangled with love and loss, Ray’s imaginal ocean takes on mythological and psychological dimensions, revealing itself as a vast unknowable realm embodying both the beautiful and terrifying aspects of the sublime.
“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.”