Light into Darkness:
Joy Ray's Poetic Materiality
by Betty Ann Brown
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel-pit, a little whitening, and some coal dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture...
~John Ruskin
Joy Ray takes the mud and dust that John Ruskin speaks of and translates them into lyrical images of light emerging from darkness. Chalky white contrasts with velvety black. Thick undulations of pigment are constrained by fragile knotted threads. Abstract hieroglyphs hint at mysterious rituals. Ray's artworks can be understood as icons of materiality, the stuff from which they are made serving as their primary inflexions (paper, pigment, fabric, etc.) Alternatively, they can be interpreted symbolically, alluding to both the darkness of dread and the illumination of hope.
One of Ray's aesthetic inspirations is Spanish master Antoni Tapies (1923-2012). Tapies was profoundly interested in the materiality of image making. He burned his canvases, glued clothes and furniture to them, covered them with honey. His work was part of pintura materica ("matter painting") in which humble, non-artistic materials were incorporated into the compositions. (Arte Povera artists in Italy grappled with similar "non-art" materials, from clothing to coal to plastic bags.)
Ray takes the mud and dust that John Ruskin speaks of and translates them into lyrical images of light emerging from darkness.
Joy Ray's oeuvre also should be considered pintura materica. Most of her work is done on Osnaburg, a coarsely woven cotton traditionally used for draperies and upholstery. She enriches the fabric texture with heavy yarn and with roving, i.e., long bundles of pre-spun fibers. Both are stitched down then painted. Ray's process heightens the physicality of her media; the palpable presence of textile, text, and painted gestures invites tactile response. Viewers want to touch her works, if not actually, then in virtual caresses.
Although she also has a studio in downtown Los Angeles, Joy Ray spends most of her time in her Hawaii home. The colors and textures of the volcanic isle influence her. And she has been inspired by the ancient rock art of the Big Island. Her recent "Post Apocalyptic Petroglyphs" series might have been excavated from indigenous sites there. With spirals, bars, crosses, and squares, Ray's oeuvre deploys primal abstract forms much like the thousands etched into the petrified lava flows of Pu'u Loa National Park. The artist's private calligraphy resembles runic texts. She stitches her geometric "alphabet" onto irregular rectangles to construct compositions that read like venerable palimpsests. As it happens, Tapies also developed his own language of marks (bars, Xs, crosses, etc.) and arrayed them across canvases that resemble ancient artifacts.
Tapies has been linked with American Abstract Expressionism and Joy Ray's oeuvre shares that conceptual connection. Like Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, et alia, Ray uses dynamic abstraction to chart her emotional states. She speaks of lived instabilities that produce cognitive dissonance, especially the conceptual conflicts of residing on a paradisiacal island that is constantly threatened by hurricanes or other natural disasters. Such instability is visually expressed in Ray's seductive contrasts of color, texture, and scale. Her compositions become objective correlatives of her emotional states.
Joy Ray is on the watch. And she documents her surveillance in exquisitely meditative works of resonant materiality.
Although Motherwell is best known for his architecturally scaled Elegy to the Spanish Republic series (1948-1967), he also created smaller works that involved collaged components, from torn paper to textiles to fragments of printed maps or musical notations. His affinity for black-white contrasts and his expressive use of thickly impastoed paint situate him firmly within Ray's creative territory. Although she traverses aesthetic territories first charted by earlier artists like Tapies and Motherwell, Joy Ray is very much her own person, with her own signature style.
German-American poet Charles Bukowski has written:
There is a light somewhere.
It may not be much light
but It beats the darkness.
Be on the watch.
Joy Ray is on the watch. And she documents her surveillance in exquisitely meditative works of resonant materiality.
April 2020