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 rephotographing 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.

The widespread artistic fascination with family, national and racial past reflects large-scale social changes. The Immigration Act of 1965 brought newcomers streaming to this country, and refugees from wars in Asia soon followed. The civil rights movement sharpened blacks' consciousness of their African heritage, and other movements like feminism and gay pride encouraged various groups to assert that being different were an honorable estate. Even the call of adoptees for access to their records and their birth parents testifies to the intensifying desire to come to terms with one's origins. what ever they may be.

Maria Martinez-Cañas was born in Cuba in 1960 but soon displaced; her family moved to Miami when she was three months old and to Puerto Rico, she spoke Spanish in a household that maintained an essentially Cuban culture. She was also highly aware of how important it was to Puerto Ricans to preserve their separate identity even though they were born American. Both of her parents collected Latin American art, so the visual traditions of that culture were woven into her life from the beginning.

Martinez-Cañas visited her grandmother in Miami often enough to know something of the mainland, moved to Philadelphia to attend the Philadelphia College of Art, took her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Chicago Art Institute in 1984, and continues to live in the states. "To Cubans on the island,'' she says, "I'm probably not Cuban, but here I am. My generation experienced a kind of limbo." Her work has been a continuous voyage through that borderless state, seeking to draw boundaries and organize a landscape from a past that never issued her an identity card -- a nebulous kind of past by no means exclusive to Cubans, or even entirely to immigrants.

Over some twenty years of artistic quest, Martinez-Cañas has combined photographs with hand-made graphic designs and carried a visual dialogue with the art and popular imagery of Cuba. In the totem series of the early nineties, near-abstract jungle forms grow unchecked across the surface of the image. Half totem and half cactus, they harbor within their outlines travel photographs of Latin America, Spain, sometimes North America; on close inspection the images translate into fierce organic emblems embracing evidence of high civilizations of the past and the advance of colonialism. Work of this period rang the changes (occasionally a bit too obviously) on the art of Cuba's best-known painter, Wifredo Lam, as if to say that Cuba's own civilization was well worth mining.

In a highly inventive portfolio based on Cuban postage stamps, Martinez-Cañas turned to another and more popular level of Cuban art. She re-imagined those little expediters of love notes and overdue bills as vigorous interplays of photography and abstract form -- thrusting shapes harnessed to the gray, photographic records of deserted urbanscapes or fragile human bodies.

In other compositions of the nineties, the graphic outlines turned unmistakably figural. Surfaces were often crisscrossed by grids, strongly reminiscent of urban plans, or laced with maps. In Spain on a Fulbright-Hayes grant in 1986, Martinez-Cañas had fallen under the spell of centuries-old maps of Cuba and documents of the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. These evidently struck her as potent clues to unraveling some coded message about the past: Rosetta Stones to help her make sense of her own history in terms of epic events plotted and recorded long ago.

Now, in the Imagen Escrita series, Martinez-Cañas has literally drawn on the past. The images are printed directly on old documents pertaining to maritime trade between Spain and Cuba, insurance contracts for sea voyages, personal travel papers from the days before passports. Over these legal and civil documents, some on smooth paper, some on heavier paper with a pronounced texture, she lays freehand maps of Cuban lakes and boundaries and provinces a Cuba she does not quite know, the territory of her mind. The photographs of pre-Columbian art, mountains, pyramids and urbanscapes that well up, pale and insistent, within the complicated outlines of districts and across neat tracks of scripts, are mostly of Mexico, which stands for the high Middle and South American culture centuries ago and the European conquest of it.

These images, each unique, are platinum prints, with platinum's soft and seemingly ancient tones of tan, pale graphite and silver. Each is a palimpsest in which various layers of the past have grown so transparent they let other layers wink through. (Transparency as a means of seeing through and into an image, suggesting layered deposits of meaning, recurs in her art. In earlier images she sometimes used leaves or onionskin for the ghostly, diaphanous trace they left on paper. As a child, Martinez-Cañas dreamed of being an archaeologist; her work is a kind of oblique allusive excavation of the mind's journey back to starting points.) In #IX, the Maritime Insurance Company of Havana, its logo a ship under full sail, assures the contract holder of ... Who knows? The message is interrupted and overrun by maps and the loosely drawn borders of imaginary regions.

Language, like cartography, is a way to organize the world; here the two interact to define a reverie. The typeface runs black across the paper, the notes in a nineteenth century hand have faded to brown, the photographs of Mexican monuments are a soft, metallic gray. The photographs in this series are modest, unassertive, softly faded like the inky notations, as if time and history yearned to reclaim them but could not quite manage it.

The boundaries of these maps quiver with. life, some writhing (see #XI, with its flame like excrescences), some performing antic dances as if they were the pieces of an insoluble jigsaw puzzle (see #XIII) some bold and aggressive, threatening to engulf the script (see #IV). They spread, they grow, they impinge, they send out feelers into new territory in the form of stippled areas, tentative borders, shadowy washes, irregular rivers of black. Ancient masks and figurines swim up like ghostly presences; cathedrals raise their strong profiles in a dim and bleached-out light. In #XV, a great Mexican pyramid has been taken apart and minimally reconfigured, another artistic means of claiming and reinterpreting the past.

To make these hybrid images, Martinez-Cañas uses a graphic material called amberlith that blocks light except where she cuts it away. Sometimes she abrades it with a tiny screwdriver to achieve the effect of stippling, or fingerpaints with thinned, liquid amberlith to make a kind of fluid wave across the surface. The cut sheet is combined with photographic negatives, then used as a contact negative and printed on the sensitized travel document.

Language and images merge, emerge, and hide. Words stubbornly pop up before and behind maps and photographs, staccato messages too often occluded to convey precise meanings. Artists in recent years have been enormously interested in the conjunction of image and text; Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Glenn Ligon. Annette Lemieux's Portable World (1986) presents a typewriter that has apparently typed out a very long strip of maps.

For maps, too, fascinate contemporary artists like Johns, David Wojnarowicz, Guillermo Kuitca or Martinez-Cañas, maps stand for the voyage across life and into the past; they become, she says, "an object to locate me, or to find who I am." Her multi-layered images are analogous to memories of travel, which are themselves montages of moments and monuments, signs and discoveries, sharp focus and blurred edges. For Martinez-Cañas, the maps and words, old documents and images of cities, landscape and art are clues to a Cuba she cannot quite discover.

For us, they whisper of searches for our own places and pasts. The sense of being an outsider, painfully sharp among immigrants and their children, has afflicted everyone at some time, and the journey through memory in search of rapprochement with the past is far more common than exile. "Historic continuity with the past is not a duty," as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. pointedly remarked; "it is only a necessity."

Vicki Goldberg © 1995