Mining Memory

Judith Allen’s and Amy Ray’s family histories at the Hay Gallery

By Chris Thompson

Judith Allen’s collages and etchings and Amy Ray’s photographs are at the Hay Gallery through May 5. Call (207) 773-2513.

“WHAT I FOUND IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE”: Xerox prints on paper on gauze, by Judith Allen.

Does there stand, anywhere on the earth, a monument to mothers and their daughters? If you’re a woman like Mary, the mother of a great man, or like Lady Liberty, mother-figure for patriarchy and nationalism, you may have a shot at statuehood. Of course if you’re a man and you’ve even thought about fighting in a war you’re all but assured to have your likeness cast and placed at the edge of a park or in some municipal building, crowned with laurel leaves, holding a rifle or a scroll or some other emblem of deeds destined to be forgotten by almost everyone as soon as they are translated into stone or metal. But what kind of monument comes at the end of a lifelong commitment, surely no less heroic, to raising daughters, or sons; to balancing one’s own life and desires with the dedication to theirs?

The works of Judith Allen and Amy Ray provide poignant answers to this question. Working with delicate materials and ephemeral techniques, their monuments to family history remind us that — in contrast to the forgotten Colonel Bronze poised aloft on his equestrian mount — the more fragile and fleeting a monument’s form, and the less it announces itself as a monument, the more it allows what it commemorates to resonate, stirring up the thoughts, sights, sounds, and fleeting recollections that are housed in the random sensory montage that is our memory.

Collectively entitled “What I Found in My Mother’s House,” Allen’s work consists of luminous collage-quilt hybrids made of etchings and Xerox prints arranged on paper and mounted on gauze. The show is anchored by a series of larger compositions, which Allen compares to pages in a journal, one of which was made for each month of the year. These are interspersed with a range of smaller collages, experiments with the arrangements of image fragments that reappear in the large works. The images themselves are prints made from photocopies of excerpts from her family’s diaries and photos, drawings and letters, quilts, and other items reaching back five generations.

Allen writes that she “discovered this wealth of family history as I sorted through my mother’s Rockland home after her stroke.” Her works themselves embody this process of sorting through a kaleidoscopic array of pieces of memories, her own and her family’s, using these clips and bits of text and image as patchwork parts of a collage combining past and present, familiar and distant, memories and memorabilia. Allen uses traditional quilt patterns to arrange these fragments, but the fact that her work uses layers of printed paper and images of textiles, instead of hand-stitching actual textiles, allows for a rich play between transparent and opaque surfaces, between the repeating quilted pattern and the occasional image that interrupts it. This underpins a deeper dialogue in the work, between her own memory’s familiar voices and those that issue forth from her materials. They are voices of the ghosts of people she may have only heard her mother or grandmother speak about. And these people compete for a chance to chime in to the story she’s creating out of the muted colors of time-soaked photographs and parchment.

While the labor involved in the creation of Allen’s prismatic family histories is readily apparent, Amy Ray’s framed polaroid photographs disguise the painstakingness of their construction. They speak at first of the kind of immediacy we associate with the instant photograph. But the snap of the shutter is only the last step of an almost obsessive process in which Ray scrutinizes her own old family films, continually rewinding, pausing, moving frame by frame to get just the right shot. She uses that most impatient of photographic techniques to record the highlights from miles of footage, trying to capture something from a film-still that itself tried to capture something from a moment in the life of the photographer who now, as she works, revisits that moment both on film and in her memory. The result is a reinvented family album of hazy Technicolor scenes: backyard tea parties, beach visits, and childhood leisure. Interestingly, every image, even in those where she is not visible, is charged by the presence of Ray’s mother. Whether this mother figure is the photographed, the photographer, or the welcoming lap just off camera, this suite of images is a homage to her. Ray writes: “When my mother was dying she had many visions and would point to and comment on the people from her past appearing before her. Her visualization of memory was so powerful it was almost palpable in the room.”

It still is. “Mother (#1)” shows Mom with young Amy perched on her shoulder. The look on her mother’s face is one of the most moving things you’ll ever see. She gives the world a look that communicates the kind of heroism which, though we may be able to understand, we haven’t quite learned to talk about yet. With her daughter’s little hand cupped around her neck, she surveys that world and wonders whether it can ever be worthy of the angel sitting on her shoulder.

Chris Thompson can be reached at: xxtopher@hotmail.com.