New testaments

Joyce Ellen Weinstein’s memory collection

By Chris Thompson

Joyce Ellen Weinstein’s “Collective Memory” shows at the Hay Gallery, in Portland, through December 30. Call (207) 773-2513.

JERUSALEMSCAPE VII: (detail) mixed media, 2001, 27” x 34,” by Joyce Ellen Weinstein.

According to anthropologist Michael Taussig, social survival depends upon knowing what not to know.

Reading Joyce Ellen Weinstein’s work means forgetting about legibility. Her paintings and assemblages, which mix media like a DJ mixes tracks, combine photographs, photocopies and text, paint and ink, sticks and sand into unsettling meditations upon the ways in which, despite our efforts, the past continues to erupt into the present.

Her work at the Hay Gallery combines visual and visceral into a nuanced vocabulary, fine-tuned through her long-term dialogue with the legacies of past and present violence in relation to Jewish history and identity.

In 1966, Japanese artist Yoko Ono wrote that “There may be a dream that two dream together, but there is no chair that two see together.” This statement addresses the ever-present tension between the impossibility of any two individuals, no matter whether they grew up in the same family or on opposite ends of the earth, ever sharing the same perception of an event. Similarly, Gandhi argued that for everything that happens, there are no less than seven entirely different, and yet perfectly valid, ways to interpret it. And at the same time, implicit in Gandhi’s and explicit in Ono’s statement, is the possibility that those individuals might nevertheless share something more intimate and profound — like hope, for instance.

The use of these two proponents of nonviolence, Ono and Gandhi, is a fitting way to address Weinstein’s work. It is “work” in the fullest sense of the word, borne both of emotional and intellectual engagement and a commitment to an art of manual labor. Through this labor, as both process and content, she excavates the sedimented layers of collective memory, and reactivates like an archaeologist the relationships between experiences from her travels over the past several years from her home in the outskirts of Washington, DC to Prague, Jerusalem, and Lithuania.

In “A Lithuanian Story,” vertical rhythms of Hebrew script alternate with fragments of photographs. She has written over both by hand to produce a collaged narrative that, by covering the patterns of texts and images with layers of thick glaze, she has rendered untranslatable. The scene captures the sense of dynamism reduced almost to inertia, as if an entire yellowed film-reel has been fossilized within the bounds of a single frame. The frozen patchwork of partial records holds us between the here of desire and the there of its realization, unable to wrest clarity out of confusion even though the tale has been held still.

Weinstein thus holds the possibility of historical inquiry and resolution out to us, but only just so far. A single image of what appears to be a monument, bearing what look like names and dates in Hebrew cut into its stone surface, underscores this tension between the wish for knowledge and the urgent pressure to know what not to know.

She has said: “In general my work concerns itself with the understanding of human relationships, beginning with ourselves and extending outward to include family, community, ethnicity, and nationality.” This approach is “cosmopolitan” in the strict sense of the word, in the sense of Diogenes’s claim: “I am a citizen of the world.” This open and inclusive methodology permits Weinstein to cobble together a network of associations between otherwise disparate and far-flung associations, tales, memories, and testaments to them.

In her “A Jerusalem Story,” she engages with Jewish identity at its historical and geographical epicenter. The vertically-oriented pattern of “Lithuanian Story” is echoed by a horizontal wall built bit by tiny bit from weathered and worn images of Jerusalem: scraps of photographs, snaps of postcards, corners of tourist maps, details of row upon row of dilapidated brick walls. Weinstein then works against this visual flow by writing, against its grain, excerpt upon excerpt from the episodic history of the city.

The result, again, moves us to the edge of illegibility. Were she to leave it at this, it would be a mildly interesting exercise, a complicated but simplistic visual essay. But rather than just pointing at this impenetrability, Weinstein takes us through its threshold, actually compelling us to undertake the thankless labor of sifting through the relics of this thing called collective memory, and to begin to tease out our own personal relations to it.

This conjunction of aesthetics and cosmopolitics is at its most haunting in what are, for lack of a less traditional word, her most traditional images, a series of linoleum block prints of moments from the Old Testament. The array of media that congregate in her other images are here reduced to the stark simplicity of black ink against white page, but her handling of shape and line permit the same complexity in the articulation of the range of human relationships.

Her “Abraham and Isaac” shows an Abraham whose body is lean and gnarled, muscles tensed in the moment of his seizure of his beloved boy’s arm, twisted as he takes his step toward the almost-sacrifice that clinched his faith. In this decisive moment, the old man turns toward us with a face haggard, worn, desperate, yet flooded with faith. His eyes meet ours in a flash of recognition that puts into the simplest terms the secret of collective memory, cosmopolitanism, as well as nonviolence: he is you, they is us.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com