MARINA FONT AND THE THREAD OF THE FEMININE MEMORY

By Adriana Herrera | el Nuevo Herald | Miami

ARTS | February 24, 2017

Photography in black and white of a middle-aged woman completely naked and captured with the palms of the hands extended, recurs again and again in works intervened with thread, doilies, textiles and gold leaf. That incessant repetition of the portrait of the woman, alien to any environment, and his stripping of all erotic or dramatic quality, are of his nudity of an ontological attribute: she exposes her being in a way that is so essential that it seems to contain all women.

A deeply personal and at the same time archetypal, collective language speaks of the feminine universe and us back in time, from the experience of travel in the space inhabited by the ubiquitous naked. Reproduced in three full scale works, it is possible to see it from front, with the involved background with black paint, and from rear, where seams made reverse is exposed by hand with an endless red thread. Font weaves in images, so that reappears in ever-changing configurations.

Font extends frame by frame the thread that goes from the matrix to the son, a thread that is blood, but which can also take the color of the milk and the fluids through which flow the memory and life. It can be a white and red lace falling on a platter, or wrapped around a substitute image of the microscopic view of stem cells.

This thread appeared in her work at the beginning of this decade, while doing a Fine Art Masters degree at Barry University, where two mentors marked her devoted commitment to her practice: Maria Martinez-Cañas, who received the rigor research on the expansion of the borders of photography, and Maria Brito, with her visceral honesty in the creation. It was when, at an early age, she experienced the lost of biological fertility and has devoted herself to a new life cycle that led her to turn the head of memory of all women who preceded her in self-created warp.

Her previous series was titled “Dark Continents”, such as the expression of Freud indicated the unexplored continent of female sexuality. In Mental Maps she uses the intervention of yarn, embroidery, crochet or fabrics to give it the universe of networks and relationships that contain and are contained in thought, the biology and the social body of women. Font indicates that the work exhibited has correlation with the literary procedure of stream of consciousness that tries to reproduce the complexity of a human being that thinks, feels, sees and moves among the others with a language that breaks structures of time. What we see, what is exposed, is not an outdoor nudity: is a visual approach to the internal women’s infinite universe.

When she was 20 years old she lived some time in Buenos Aires with her paternal grandmother, Emma, a female descendant of Swedish and English immigrants who had grownup like herself, running to the wind in the landscape of Cordoba and ended up marring a General, under whose regime became invisible. His presence that ordered the domestic world from a silence that was ever deeper at the dinner table, where he was the only one speaking. After the death of the general, her grandmother began to make archives of the family history, recollected photos and created collages with found watercolors and poems arising out of the bottom of all that silence. Seeing and hearing that journal of overlapping memories of a woman who had taken 70 years on his way to the world, was a revelation that is the origin of her works.

“It is not a coincidence that the artist uses fabrics found at flea markets or the ones given to her by her friends. These represent our mothers and grandmothers, their stories, homes, habits” highlights gallerist Dina Mitrani, pointing out that both using these fabrics and with the thoroughness that the artist sews thaem to the photograph.

Some of her works evoke particular and very personal family stories, as Conversations over Coffee, Conversations Over Tea, which reflect the dilemas of the branches of Spanish and English descent of the family, which at the Falkland \’s war were at opposite sides of the conflict; others bring us closer to the connection, from biology, among all women, or equate the female body to the amazon in a tree that makes clear the air of the entire earth.

In all cases, her language ties us, beyond words, to the timeless feminine memory thread.