MARINA FONT: DARK CONTINENTS

BY AMALIA CAPUTO | ART NEXUS MAGAZINE

June 2014

Photographer Marina Font presented a group of twenty laborious, playful and devoted photographic pieces and an installation in the exhibition titled Dark Continents at the Dina Mitrani Gallery, in Miami. Her third solo exhibition at this gallery, Font focuses in these works on women and their time, the complexity of their psyche and the exploration of female metaphors. This exhibition continues with the reflections that Font has been making on the female gender and the enigmatic and intrinsic issues of women, but this time from a place closer to biology, the cycles and fertility.

The term Dark Continents was originally coined by Henry Morton-Stanley in his definition about Africa, and later used as an analogy by Freud in his essay Questions of Lay Analysis (1926), in which he argues that for the study of psychology, both the female psyche and female sexuality are dark, difficult to grasp, complicated and uncharted subjects. This analogy is intended, first, to assert the inability of the other to understand the complexity of the female gender, and secondly, to exalt the concerns and the conquering abilities of regions or women. Thus, in the work by Marina Font, the body is seen as a topographic surface, a metaphorical map of the complexities of the inner self.

Dark Continents consists of two bodies of work that are very different from each other: On the one hand, there is the extensive group of black and white photographs printed on canvas that focus on the body of a single woman. Her figure is sometimes depicted full, sometimes fragmented or intervened manually—with embroidery, lace, buttons, tulle and other fabrics associated with the domestic activities attributed to femininity and manual labor; and, on the other hand, there is an installation and two non-intervened color photographs that are more conceptual in nature and that address the cycles of fertility in women in general, and in Font’s case in particular.

The formal strategy of this first body of work of manually intervened photos, in which Font repeats the same pose, is striking. This implies to question precisely what the group relies on: seriality, the generalization of the genre and showing a woman with an asexual posture who stands frontally before the world as an analytical and objectual model that calls into question the subject/object relationship between the woman and the viewer. The body is placed here as a vehicle to express the loss of body identity, to become something like a membrane that divides the imaginative internal borders form the external ones; which initially suggests, well, alienation and, on the other hand, it seeks to metaphorically “weave”—in some cases more obvious than others—cyclic interior spaces, hormones and fertility based on those weaves.

The proposals by Marina Font are founded on a beautiful formal simplicity that often works on a structured basis that relies on repetition to make her message more evident. Thus, she purposefully seeks to avoid being confusing with unnecessary changes in the forms. This is the reason why, in the end, the photographic image practically disappears—we forget about it—in order to give way to something else: the patient and laborious hand work that in her case also appears to be talking about the moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance that are intrinsically associated with women.

Perhaps Font wants to point to the kind of seriality that comes from a biological/anatomical analysis of women as objects of study in anatomy charts, in an attempt to develop a type of poetics that characterizes the genre; distinctives that represent an essential condition of what defines being a woman. Some of these are more obvious than others—like the one in which the body is embroidered (imprisoned) in a bird cage—or more suggestively, as in the case of Royal (2013), in which crochet appliques completely cover the face of the model. These works precisely suggest this creative freedom that is set in contrast to the rigidity of the pose and that represents the intricate mysteries of the body and the mind, clearly the other unknown continents which constitutes femininity.

From the perspective of domestic and manual labor, Font speaks of what women “should” be and do. She poetically confronts a question about the roles imposed on gender, as she reflects on the collective unconscious that records the experiences that mark the life of a woman.

A key aspect of the exhibition is the willingness to symbolically connect all the pieces with fertility, motherhood and the woman-mother-goddess archetypes. This is exemplified most clearly in the second body of work: a suggestive installation of twenty-six color photographs—not intervened—that depict groups of eggs illuminated on a concrete floor, representing Font’s own fertility cycles. It is thanks to this installation that the artist manages to create a dynamic reading among the entire group of works in the exhibition, where not only the partially or totally covered faces and bodies, in anatomical positions, speak of individual female etymologies, but where the entire group also relates to processes that are rather universal; the widespread subtleties of the inner body.

It is precisely based on this rupture of formats and strategies that the artist succeeds in establishing a gap between body and memory, between biological complexity and manual craftsmanship, the vivid remembrance of what is not remembered in detail: hormonal changes, cells, ovulation cycles, and the darkness which, although not easily perceived, clearly exalts the polyphony of being a woman.