COPENHAGEN — From far away, the paintings of Firelei Báez look fantastical. In “Encyclopedia of gestures (Jeu du monde),” for example, a humanoid creature in brilliant floral colors crouches down, as moss and flowers emerge from its head. In “The promise of being continuously so,” a feminine figure in dark shades of blue and green reclines in a supine twist, legs hanging downward while the figure appears to gaze upward.
But upon closer examination, these images are painted on top of something more mundane: maps of the world. With the first example, the outlines of the 17th-century board game Le Jeu du Monde (Game of the World) are the surface upon which the main subject crouches. The purpose of the game is to progress from the outer parts of the world, from places like Guinea and Guyana, to the center, represented by France. With the latter example, the languorous figure rests atop a 19th-century map by a Czech naval doctor and oceanographer who divided the world into 20 sections, adding rich illustrations of the Pacific Ocean’s winds.
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These two works appear in Trust Memory Over History, the first European survey of the Dominican-American artist’s work, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Based in New York, Báez explores the way we think about time and space, especially, as the title implies, with relation to cultural memory.
In “How to slip out of your body quietly,” Báez works with the image of the ciguapa, a creature from Dominican folklore that wanders with its feet turned backward, making it hard to locate. The entities appear to be dancing toward each other, with palm fronds atop their torsos, and some of their feet have grown stilettos. “Báez employs the ciguapa as an image of of freedom in relation to landscape, gender and race,” the exhibition text notes. “A creature that cannot be controlled or contained — a true artist of survival.”
The show’s eponymous work, “Trust Memory Over History (Seeking counsel with the Rada Loa),” consists of a cloud of dozens of pieces of archival materials collected from books, including during the artist’s time studying at Cooper Union. Some of the pages include maps while others contain illustrations and photos that she modifies with characteristic flair, sometimes with figures and other times with abstract shapes.
Color contrasts and the lack thereof are important to Báez’s approach. As she notes in a video on the Louisiana Channel, colors contain memories and histories of their own: “I think, irrespective of the geography, there’s always a cultural volume behind each color. For me, when I use blue I would like to evoke the energy of yemọja, which is the deity of the oceans of renewal and life.”
Throughout the show, I sensed two different ways of seeing the world. In one, I saw the dispassionate expression of maps designed to see the globe as a geography of borders, territories, and objects of exploration and conquest. In the other, I saw vibrant figures emerging from nature, coming from the world of memory, myth, and magic. They’re fantastical, yes, and it’s increasingly clear that the maps, too, are a fantasy, advancing the fiction that we could treat the earth as an object to be measured, cut up, and extracted from without consequences.
Trust Memory Over History continues at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark) through February 18. The show was curated by Mathias Ussing Seeberg and Assistant Curator Amalie Laustsen.
Source: Hyperallergic.com