marina font remakes female nudes with vintage textiles

By Elisa Turner | Hamptons Art Hub

February 2017

Ironically, Marina Font’s skills with digital photography led her to discover a decidedly low-tech material: vintage doilies. With digital transforming so much of photography, Font discovered she was missing the tactile sensations of working with her hands while developing film in the darkroom.

Her dilema: how to create art again by including the purely physical pleasure of touch?

By recovering the sweet charms of crocheted doilies- the ones your grandmother might have used for fussy decoration or to protect the furniture from scratches and watermarks- these slight, vintage textiles created by hand now enhance and amplify the effect of Font’s photography, transferred via digital technology to various surfaces, both large and small. In devising the brilliant paradox, Font uses vintage textiles to remake photographic traditions of female nudes.

For her show “Mental Maps” at Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami’s Wynwood Art District, Font’s worked, for the most part, with a single black and white photograph of a female nude to create over 40 distinctive works on canvas and paper, ranging in size from 8” x 6” to 60” x 100”. It’s her most recent series mixing photography with textiles. There’s a strong feminist sensibility at play here.

The art includes smaller works such as Untitled (ojos), in which the nude is cropped just above the breasts and the face is obscured by two white round doilies with red fringe at the center of each. The doilies are clearly a wry, tenderly humorous stand-in for the absent breasts, even though they are placed over the eyes. Like breasts, they are constructed with an intricate delicacy. But as the identity-shielding element in the woman’s photograph, the fringed doilies also make an undeniable statement about the absurdity of gazing at a woman by focusing solely on her body sex appeal.

An other smaller work shows the body covered by a glided set of interconnected triangles, almost disappearing behind the hard edges and sharp angles of this golden cage. Font has created an intriguing metaphor for rigid traditions about women’s professional and social roles and what they are worth, in terms of financial value.

One of the largest works, Celulas Madres (Stem Cells). With only hands and feet visible, this body is covered with dozen of small patches of white fabric shaped like cells, each patch embroidered with a mass of blood-red French knots. It’s an arresting image, inspired by stem cells seen through a microscope. In a curious collusion of linguistics and art emphasizing the female body’s womb as the source of life, the Spanish word for Stem Cells is “celulas madres, ”or “mother cells.”

An other large work, Untitled (phycological), is almost brutally direct in its bloody, visceral imagery. Still, it remains undeniable touching for the painstaking delicate embroidery outlining the flow of blood from the brain to the womb. It also brings to mind iconic self-portraits by Frida Khalo, like The Two Fridas.

Such work confronts the eye with imagery attesting to the female body’s frank, fleshy vulnerability and persistence strength. It briefly recalls clinical photographs in medical text books, but is modified by the artist’s hands to probe notions about what it means to mature as a woman in the 21st Century.

Font intuitively stitches together a complex array of possibilities, looking forward and back through time, inviting comparisons to history as well to Anna Mendieta’s performances and photography. In “Mental Maps”, the female body appears to have worn the test of time with grace and patience. Moreover, in the various ways Font has embellished this figure, the face is never completely visible. The naked woman is anonymous, a humble archetype perhaps, intimately revealed and psychological concealed.

Give all the hot-button political issues swirling around this year’s Women’s March in Washington, DC, Font’s show is unexpectedly timely. It even brings to mind the crowd of knitted and crocheted “pussy hats” blooming throughout photographs of demonstrations in chilly weather, surely recalling spring flowers poking through snow.

While “Mental Maps” may reflect pop culture’s growing interest in “subversive knitting” and “radical crocheting”, to borrow Alexa Gothhardt’s terms in her January 25, 2017, Artsy Editorial, it’s also timely in more artcentric ways. As Gothhardt explains, a number of contemporary artists are adopting techniques of knitting and crocheting- no longer “just” women’s work for their “boundary-pushing, politically charged” possibilities in art. These artists are expanding upon feminist themes evoked by knitting and crocheting found in art by Louise Burgois, and Rosemarie Trockel and others back in the 1970s and 1980s.

As Font explains in her artist’s statement, the “central axis” of this work is to show how the female body is “perceived. mainly though three planes: the biological, the psychological and the social, as well as the juxtaposition and connections among them.” The doilies and embroidery Marina Font combines with her photography are meant to serve a different function than your grandmother’s craft: to be a lighting rod for realizations on the state of the feminine.

To this point, Untitled (melting thoughts) has well kept traditions unraveling -if not exploding-in hunks of multi-colored yarn apparently erupting from this woman’s brain, completely veiling her face. Some drip down her chest.

The textiles the artist melds with her photography layer the art with rich associations of the patient, too often ignored, intricate, time-consuming, and hands-on labour. This labour has traditionally been expanded in the serving of shielding and decorating the home and female body.

The endlessly controversial meaning of a “woman’s place” is presented in several of her works on view with a simple geometric form, akin to a child’s drawing of a house. In the context of this show, Font gracefully endows this simple shape with interwoven suggestions of many women’s domestic and social obligations, traditionally expended in the service of shielding and decorating the home and female body.

In “Mental Maps,” Font is charting vibrant new territories for reflecting upon, rather than gazing at, a woman’s body in the 21st Century.