Marina Day
BLACK SUN STORIES
Dan O'Melveny Gallery, Los Angeles
2000

Marina Day's vision comes from an innate sense of the sacred within the ordinary. She loves antiquated maps and documents, baby shoes, dolls and watches, eyeglasses, old leather-bound books. An inveterate seeker, she scours junk shops and antique shows for things that call out to her from the material world, with no particular rhyme or reason but that they resonate with some internal, as yet perhaps unspoken or unrealized need. The call can be strong- so strong that, in some instances, when she has resisted, she will return months, even years later to respond to it. And even then, once she has the object in her hands, it may be years before it finds its particular, necessary place in one of her art works, the place that seems always to have been waiting for it.

It is the shifting, magical space between the internal, seeking self and the world of objects that is the ground for her assemblages and paintings. It is a space where accident and intention merge in dialogue, where surprise takes on the air of inevitability, and where distinctions between self and other are forged into the singularity of unique vision. It is, in short, the space of poetry. Broached first by pioneer Dadaists and Surrealists like Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, the art of assemblage established deep and venerable roots in American art of the twentieth century, with Joseph Cornell its perhaps most prominent and accomplished practitioner. In California, particularly, the tradition has found thriving expression since mid-century in the work of artists like Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Betye Saar. In this tradition, the artist is the magician of the sacred, seducing the observer into a bemused, unquestioning acceptance of the marvelous through acts of transformation. Only poetry of this kind explains why a jumble of fishing net floats belongs so rightly with a cloud of raw sheep's wool (as in Day's "Water Sheep," 1998), or an old pharmaceutical prescription with a piece of sackcloth, an open seed pod, an antique box and the weight from a fishing line ("Lure," 1999).

Transformation of the ordinary was in part the goal, too, in the early years of the last century, when artists like Picasso and Braque first started collaging shards of wood or torn pages of newspaper into their paintings, highlighting the materiality of the surface. That field of exploration continued strong in Europe through the century, in the work of artists like Joan Miro and Anton Tapies, with whom Day feels a strong aesthetic affinity. When she formed the intention to add painting to her repertoire, she drew naturally on that same sensibility that had attracted her to assemblage. Allowing herself a new freedom to interact with them, she began to incorporate three-dimensional objects into the surface of a painting and to work over, around, and between them to find her path. She had previously begun to explore the materiality of two-dimensional surfaces in construction pieces, using old medical prescriptions, bills and indentures, even religious dispensations as backgrounds for her visual poetry. Soon she discovered a new, rich field for exploration in layering geographical maps and charts with rice paper to create a painting surface. While some of their original informational content was preserved through the scumbling of her paint, other areas were obscured by its opacity, requiring the constant, active complicity of the viewer's eye in the act of her creation.

This is the context for Day's most recent work, the series of paintings which share the image of a collaged "black sun." Here, the visual substrate-more or less revealed-retains a map-like quality: no longer geographical, however, these charts map intimate cellular biological or anatomical forms, the inner workings of natural or human bodies. They work as metaphors for the internal structures of the self, delicate renderings of the processes of life. Overpainted in generally muted tones, these forms are incorporated into the creative act they often symbolize: "Black Sun Birth," "Black Sun Seedpod," "Black Sun Baby's Breath." These images in turn are articulated into active relationships by the black drips, or lines, or brushstrokes that are superimposed on the painted surface, sometimes as delicate and purposeful as spiders' webs, sometimes crude, awkward, wandering. And finally, the "black sun" is applied, giving sudden, almost disconcerting focus in a field where every other form seems fated to swim in a protoplasmic ocean of uncertainty.

For Day, the application of the sun is a ceremony. It might take her a while to find its exact location, but when it falls into its rightful place, she knows the piece is done. "Something inside changes" at this moment, she explains. It is the final act of transformation, the moment of birth, perhaps-though necessarily, too, of death. We might see in the "black sun" a fatal flaw, the symbol of our mortality, or the evocation of those episodes in our lives that seem so bleak: the loss, the family trauma, the curse of an addiction, which can yet turn out to be precisely the energy source we need to move further along our path. Each of these reminders of our mortal vulnerability contains the seeds of rebirth. If we listen well, Day's work will remind us that all we need to constantly reformulate ourselves and redefine where we stand, at this very moment, in our lives, is a clear consciousness and the willingness to embark on the next stage of discovery into who we are.