Maria Martinez-Cañas initiated significant thematic and technical changes in her photography at the end of the 1990s(1). 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(2). By using this method, rather than materials such as Rubyliths and Amberliths, the artist achieved a sense of immediacy on photographic paper(3). The blue-grey color of the images in Metamorphosis was produced by changes in the order of chemicals experimented with in the darkroom(4). The resulting color reminded her of the photograms of nature produced by the 19th-century photographer Anna Atkins (1799–1871). In attempting to insert herself into an earlier photographic tradition, Martinez-Cañas looked into different kinds of papers that would yield the color blue when printed. She selected diazo paper, which she used for Traces of Nature, her first large photograms on that support(5).
The photographer extended her formal and conceptual directions in late 2001 when invited to do an installation for the exhibition Humid at the Moore Space in Miami. Each artist was given a gallery to produce a new body of work on site. She was stimulated by the possibilities for producing and presenting her work in a three-dimensional space where the spectator could walk around and view the images from different perspectives. The subject Humid spurred new thoughts about thematic content. In considering the properties of the concept “humid,” wetness and liquid came to mind, prompting the artist to experiment with water and how an aqueous substance could become a photograph. On impulse, Martinez-Cañas spit on her scanner to see what her saliva would look like in a computer image. She then manipulated the digital image by slightly altering its original appearance—removing some of the outlines and reducing the scale of the saliva particles and air bubbles. Once she obtained the desired image, she began working with a scanner as if it were a camera. That marked the beginning of a new series of manipulated, abstract images. Her process included printing the image on acetate film (instead of paper) using her inkjet printer, taking the negative to the darkroom, placing it on diazo paper, and putting it inside a contact printer. There she exposed the negative with actinic light(6). After removing the diazo image, she placed it inside a handmade device and developed it with ammonia vapors.
Martinez-Cañas produced more than twenty photograms, which she titled Impermanent Evidence, on site at the Moore Space(7). In conceptualizing the design and layout of the diazo prints in the gallery, the artist further thought about fragility in relation to diazo paper, a material that dissolves in water. Therefore, to attain a sense of impermanence, she added a small quantity of water to the blue and brown diazo prints in the plexiboxes, causing the colors in the papers eventually to turn white. By adding small amounts of water each week during the two-month exhibition, the colored material of the papers slowly rose to the surface, creating a beautiful floating effect. The spectator could compare the varied imagery of both the dry and wet diazo prints—those that remained stable and those decomposing. Thus, through process and materiality, water—the substance of life—became the material witness for “impermanent evidence(8).”
The notion of impermanence, the transitory nature of life, continued to stimulate the artist’s imagination. Fascinated by alternately benign and deadly microscopic viruses and bacteria, Martinez-Cañas researched the subject, which led to the series Viruses and Bacteria (2003)(9). The photographer’s materials and processes differed from those employed in Humid: Impermanent Evidence. For the 2003 series, she scanned images of viruses, bacteria, and xrays found in medical books, then manipulated them to create richly superimposed images of visual beauty, sometimes of deadly agents. She then burned them on a DVD and had a photographic lab print them as unique Cibachrome prints ranging in size from 34 x 48 to 48 x 48 inches(10).
Martinez-Cañas had another epiphany experience in summer 2004 when she collaborated with Kim Brown, a conceptual sculptor from Alaska. The two artists had met earlier in the year at Franz Meyer of Munich, where each had conducted tests on glass for public artworks(11). In subsequent email communication, Martinez-Cañas learned that Brown did sculpture out of dust. The photographer was intrigued by the idea of an artist sweeping the residue from one’s surroundings to create an artwork. Martinez-Cañas also found the notion of sweeping dust somewhat akin to revealing evidence of one’s traces. Convinced that an opportunity for collaborative experience would be productive, Martinez-Cañas asked Brown to go to Miami to work. When presented with this idea, Brown responded: “But I don’t do photography. Martinez-Cañas countered: “And I don’t do sculpture, but let’s experiment with the two mediums.” Willing to take a risk, Brown accepted the invitation, and the two artists worked almost around the clock for eleven days on a collaborative project with no funding in hand and no exhibition objectives in mind. Their work together began with Brown making mounds out of dust. Martinez-Cañas then created photograms by placing Brown’s dust mounds on top of photographic paper and exposing them to white light. After the photograms were developed, Brown stitched the mounds to the photograms, creating three-dimensional objects. The collaborative experience was extraordinary. At the end of their project, they had forty-one gelatin silver print photograms with hand-stitched dust.
The director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA North Miami) came to see the Dustograms in Martinez-Cañas’s studio in 2005. She invited the photographer and Brown to do a collaborative installation for the exhibition Trading Places. That exhibition, similar to the one at The Moore Space provided a museum gallery as a studio for the production of their work. The two artists selected a small portion of the Dustograms from their previous project to establish the context for the second stage of their collaboration. Working together every day on site for three weeks, they created a new body of three-dimensional sculptural photographs with dust from the museum and new materials, namely newsprint and wax. The resulting artworks were large-scale photo-based sculptural objects that filled the 40 x 50 foot gallery. Some of the objects were on the wall, others were placed on a table, and still others attached to the floor.
Martinez-Cañas further explored aspects of the formal and conceptual processes in Trading Places for the sculptural, photographic site-specific installation at the Frost Museum. In preparing for A Room For Eden ( To Ana), the artist spent a month in a rural area in upstate New York where she photographed woodlands, producing a seemingly encyclopedic range of images of nature. She used a 1952, 4 x 5 Linhoff Standard Press camera to obtain high-quality negatives similar to those used by more traditional photographers(12). Although Martinez-Cañas slightly manipulated the negatives, the final images retain a strong resemblance to the landscape in and around Pine Planes, and therefore the imagery is different from the earlier abstract, botanical photograms.
Printed on Newsprint paper covered with bees wax, the photographs form a horizontal band that wraps around the walls in the gallery. Curly willow branches and other organic elements, some of which are covered with landscape scenes, suggest organic growth. Accustomed to a tropical environment, northern foliage reawakens our sensitivity to the diversity of the land here captured through the lens.
Julia P. Herzberg is an Art Historian & Curator © 2006
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Excerpt from Exhibition Catalog Essay titled Four Ways: A Room Of Her Own from the exhibition A Room Of One's Own: Teresita Fernandez, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Quisqueya Henriquez and Maria Martinez-Canas; The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL. [Sept 15 - Dec 10, 2006]
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1 Until the mid-1990s Maria Martinez-Cañas addressed subjects of place and origins. For an overview of the artist’s work, see Maria Martinez-Cañas: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (Fort Lauderdale: Museum of Art, 2002), organized by Jorge Hilker Santis with essays by Andy Grunberg and Olga M. Viso.
2 A photogram is a photograph made without a camera or lens by placing an object or objects on top of a piece of paper or film coated with light-sensitive material and then exposing the paper or film to light. The area of the paper that is covered with an object remains unexposed and light in tone; the area not covered remains dark. If the object is translucent, mid-tones appear. After exposure, the paper is developed and fixed. Among the first photograms were the photogenic drawings produced in the late 1830s by William Henry Fox Talbot, in which some of the objects were ferns, flowers, and pieces of lace. In the early 20th century, Christian Schad, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy created abstract images using the phtotogram technique.
3 After seeing the exhibition Triumph of Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo, A Survey 1975–1991 in early 1998, Martinez-Cañas was extremely moved by the rapid drawings (South Miami Hospital Series) made while Alfonzo was hospitalized for HIV-related complications. The immediacy of Alfonzo’s images instigated a change in her process so she could produce image(s) more spontaneously. Thus she stopped using Amberliths and Rubyliths, which required days, weeks, or even months to create negatives, and began doing photograms.
4 The change contaminated the chemicals, thereby causing a change in the color of the surface of the print.
5 A diazo print refers to a print that is developed on diazo paper, which is used by architects for their architectural plans. The paper is available in blue or brown.
6 Actinic light refers to the ability of certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to cause changes in various substances. Ultraviolet and almost all visible wavelengths are actinic for all panchromatic emulsions; they create the change called exposure.
7 As noted in the installation shot, the gallery was designed to exhibit large-scale photograms on the back walls; a row of alternating blue and brown photograms in open plexiboxes in the right side of the gallery; another row of blue and brown photograms in open plexiboxes submerged in water in the center isle; and acetate film with images of saliva in metal lightboxes on the left, next to an area constructed to house a light unit. A two-page spread was reproduced in A Retrospective, n.p.
8 The experience of bringing the gallery into the studio or vice-versa was one that especially appealed to the artist. She liked the daily interchange among artists and the directors of the space, and felt invigorated by not knowing exactly what the outcome would be three weeks before she started the project.
9 In part, the stimulus for exploring this particular subject was caused by the death of a very close friend who had died of a virus a few years earlier.
10 The series has not been exhibited in its entirety; however, individual photographs have been shown in Cintas: Hope and Glory at Miami Art Central in 2004 and in the Fred Snitzer Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2003.
11 Founded in 1847, Franz Mayer of Munich is a leader in the field of stained glass and mosaic.
12 She used Polaroid Positive/Negative 4 x 5 Instant Sheet film, known as Polaroid Type 55 film. |
