Coming to terms with the notion of place was one of the defining issues of the 1990s. It is a concern that continues to resonate for us today. How is it that we, as individuals (and members of a variety of communities), define and locate ourselves, charting our origins, relations, experiences, and desires, in a world characterized by endlessly shifting boundaries?

How have changes over the last several decades, in the geo-political landscape and in the manner in which we travel, communicate, and conduct business in a global marketplace, affected the way we perceive and navigate public and private space?
 

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The photographs of María Martínez-Cañas are among the most visually and semiotically complex images of our time – and even, one could argue, of the entire history of the photographic medium. They require the kind of sustained attention and interpretation that we are more used to bringing to works of literature than to works of visual art.

Quite literally, her pictures need to be read as much as looked at, since their meanings are embedded in both their overall appearance and their individual images, as well as in the interrelationships of these macro and micro levels of looking.

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Nature as a dominant subject in works of art began to appear only in the seventeenth century In the European Baroque era artists demonstrated a sensitivity to the observed world in a way that they had never done before. As art historian Kenneth Clark and other have noted, the landscape tradition of Italy, France, Flanders and Holland was born in the seventeenth century as artists often ceded pride of place to the natural world.

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Maria Martinez-Cañas initiated significant thematic and technical changes in her photography at the end of the 1990s. In a brief two-year period, from 1998 through 1999, the artist began using her body as well as nature in her work. Flight (Hospital Bed) and Prima Materia feature images of parts of her body; Garden and Metamorphosis, organic materials. The four series, from 1998, were photograms, images made without a camera on light-sensitive paper. By using this method, rather than materials such as Rubyliths and Amberliths, the artist achieved a sense of immediacy on photographic paper.

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The camera, which stops time in its tracks, constructs an instant archive of individual and social history with every click of the shutter. For the last couple of decades, many artists have dipped into this treasure house of time gone by to exploit photography's inherent power to recuperate or renegotiate the past. Carrie Mae Weems comments on the heritage of slavery by re-photographing nineteen
century portraits of half-nude male and female slaves commissioned to bolster the theory that blacks were genetically inferior. Albert Chong seeks accommodation with a mixed national and racial background by borrowing and altering old family photographs or setting up objects to suggest rituals previously unknown. Flor Garduño records and recreates the religious and folk customs that are slipping through the cracks of modern life in Mexico. Maria Martinez- Cañas, in a new series called Imagen Escrita, creates a wavering past and place to fill a blank space where a solid past eludes her.

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At the age of three months, Maria Martinez-Cañas left Cuba, and has not returned since, except in spirit. She has only her parents' memories of it: "My memories were in reality their memories." What, then, is the reality of Cuba for her? What is the meaning of this homeland that has never been home?

In 1983, in Spain for the first time, she exclaimed: "I felt I had finally come home." In Spain again in 1985-86, she studied archival materials having to do with the discovery of Cuba by Columbus. She examined old maps of the island, Havana, and other Cuban towns, as well as plans and drawings of old Cuban churches, fortresses, and ships. She measured and sketched and traced them from photocopies, with the originals in front of her.

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