Painting: Photographs by Marcia Lippman

Nailya Alexander Gallery 

January 26th - March 2nd

Constellation

“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather… what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”   ~Walter Benjamin

These new photographs locate the small areas of concentrated emotion in old paintings and sculpture, where history, memory, and the artist’s imagination coalesce. Made in 2014-2016, these images of images isolate rapturous details where the meanings of life accumulate. In one photograph, a black string tied into an off-kilter bow connects the edges of a white collar that barely covers the pale human neck below; in another, a half-closed hand falls on plush fabric, the result of a swoon, an illness, a death? Through the careful framing of a particular, instead of the whole, this work simultaneously invokes fragility, violence, romance, and mortality.  

I use the camera to create a time warp. The viewer’s eye volleys between mediums, between the temporal nature of photography and the metaphysical power of painting and sculpture. In these photographs of ancient art, the past continues into the present. These pictures, mostly of European art, were made in the United States over a two-year period, as I photographed in museums, antique shops, and historic houses. During the previous forty years, I made black and white gelatin silver prints, focusing on the pictorial and painterly aspects of photography. Working now in color and digitally, each capture is in dialogue with my analogue negatives. This project uses new technology to investigate old aesthetic and human values that do not disappear with technical change. The clarity of these photographs is a point of entry into the painting or sculpture. Paint cracks and the granularity of stone are intensified, underscoring their vulnerability. Brushstrokes are exaggerated, emphasizing the human hand that made them.

These pictures transport the viewer to a “constellation” of old and new techniques and imagery. My photographs reject the false perfection of the whole, and instead lay claim to the ambiguity of a single gesture. These pictorial fragments dislodge us even while their familiarity—a hand, a dress, a neck—unite us with our ancient selves.

Marcia Lippman 

House Stills

'What thou lovest well remains'

That Which Is: Marcia Lippman

Outside of New York, it becomes easier (read: less costly) for artists and dealers to take real chances.  A case in point was the exhibition of mostly small photographic objects with large ambitions organized by the photographer Marcia Lippman at KMR Arts in Washington Depot, Connecticut.  Lippman is known for her neo-pictorialist aesthetic, an alignment that puts her closer to Clarence White than to Jeff Wall. In this show she went all in to define her position vis a vis contemporary photography.  She hung her own work salon style in groupings of photos from her collection of vernacular and historic images.  She called these 55 groups cantos, suggesting that each was a verse of a larger poem. More like an epic of battle.  With everything from tintypes and embroidered images to French postcards, the show celebrated the many formats that once populated the photographic landscape, but it also offered an in-your-face response to the dominance of large-format color photography and the crushing institutional sameness it has brought to the medium.  It’s a sameness that many younger photographers are slowly but surely rebelling against, on the one hand through Instagram and on the other through deliberately vernacular postures.  The artist’s own images were anything but casual. Rather they were a deeply personal gathering of old and new photographs shot in locations from Italy to Argentina. Clearly the preoccupation here was the classic one of reminiscence, of memory as a complex of impressions and associations, but constantly revised, never static.  Lippman’s “museum” was as dynamic and open-ended as deck of tarot cards –ideal for plumbing the soul and reading the future.

 Lyle Rexer 

photograph, september/october 2013

That Which Is ~ Cantos I-V

That Which Is ~ Cantos VI-X

That Which Is ~ Artist's Statement

That Which Is : Marcia Lippman

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. "    Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

That Which Is, is an installation combining my photographs with found photographs I’ve collected over some 25 years. All the images, both mine and found, spoke mysteriously to some stilled memories within me. Some inner sanctum was opened, confirmed, affirmed by the texture of a marble statue, the melancholy of a deep forest, the seductive glance from a Victorian cabinet card. These are the things which penetrated me, marked me, and thus are all fragments of the archeology of my past and my perceptual process, which, now merged, have been reframed into something entirely new.

The narrative of their union veers between fact and imagination in visual poems which I call Cantos. The Cantos, which are specific combinations of images, either alone or groups of three, both mine and found, are themselves vignettes, snapshots which converse with my past. Memories, especially childhood memories, shape our inner world. They are the stories we tell to others as well as to ourselves in order to make sense of our lives. They give resonance to what is unknown and unspoken, and perhaps even what never really happened, but has become that which is. Writers like Faulkner and Pinter, Barthes and Bachelard have all echoed Proust’s thoughts that the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Oliver Sacks recently added that ‘ We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.’  These Cantos are an act of recollection. They speak to the subjective and ephemeral nature of memory and reflect on the immediacy of our past in our lives; the longing, the family secrets, the textures and stains, the loss, the absence, the love, the beauty, the fears and the dreams, all pulled forward by something in the present, by a physical object, by a photograph, which sends each of us back to our own past. Memory and photography share an alchemic relationship. That which was becomes that which is, and, in turn,that which will be.

I am a storyteller by nature. I tell stories with words and with images. Time and Memory have been the recurring stories in my photographic work for decades, long before I merged these two bodies of images and realized how, together, they emerged as a fully realized visual memoir. As Rilke discerningly observed, ‘Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.’