Memory and its Colors

By Lauren Moya Ford

When I opened the blinds this morning, the sea looked like a smooth lavender mirror. The water changes at every moment of every day. This is something I’ve learned over these past few weeks while staying in an old apartment in Santa Cruz de Oleiros, a quiet beach town in the northwest corner of Spain. Sometimes the sea is glassy turquoise, other times a rich, royal blue chopped by white waves. Another moment it’s grey opal, looking lighter than the sky. But I’d never seen it purple before, or so soft and streaked, like a mirror that still carries the fog of someone’s breath. I got back into bed and the next time I looked up, the water had changed color completely. 

I wrote that four months ago, and I remember the moment only because I wrote it down. But now that I’m thinking of that time and place again, looking for it slowly, like someone who reaches out tentatively into the dark, the memory and its colors softly take shape. The faint, floating forms in my mind are something like the flowers in Noemi Jennifer Bonnet’s delicate photo series the early earth was silent like a mind spinning. Bonnet’s images of leaves and flowers are gently crumpled, like tissues that have slipped out of someone’s pocket, or napkins blown off a table top. Memories are like that: we hold them close to our bodies or grasp them in our hands, but they fly off without us realizing it. The artist may have seen these plants – are they striped petunias? Hydrangeas? A carpet of clovers? – on a pandemic-era walk, in a front or back yard, or perhaps even before people had to be careful about time spent outside. Bonnet’s pictures are visible, but folded and crinkled into themselves, as memories often are.

Noelani Jones sees nature as a different sort of surface. Made of two hand-woven photographs, New Terrain shows a sun dappled field intercut at intervals by sprays of purple flowers that might have grown there – or somewhere else – at another time. The interlaced images make special sense at a time like this: after all, time feels flattened this year. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to move at all, especially when one is sick, sad, or still, as so many people have been this year. But Jones’ picture is the opposite of these things. Instead, it’s all shimmering light across a million quivering petals and wind-blown blades of grass. Scenes like this exist, and will keep existing, despite everything.

New Terrain is hopeful, like Christina Renfer Vogel’s Zinnias. Despite being staged in the same wide mouth glass jar against the same slate and dove grey background, this painting and its companion Late Summer Flowers both hold an unexpected magic. Renfer Vogel’s still lifes suggest marking time according to the flowers that bloomed that day. We see zinnias, but also phlox, mums, dahlias, or calendulas, perhaps. It isn’t totally clear what all the flowers are, and that’s part of what’s worth looking at in these paintings: the artist’s strokes are decisive without being overly definitive. They leave room for the eye to enjoy pure patches of color. Renfer Vogel has gone out into nature, looked around, and taken some of that nature back to the studio to look at it some more. It’s a generous gesture. By painting these flowers, the artist is saying that the bouquet is also for us.

Memory’s colors shift like the sea. Sometimes memory is a silhouette – only a dark outline of something – and other times it’s smoke, which appears and dissipates without ever truly taking shape. Memory might have a color like flowers, but it’s also dim and shadowy. Splayed hands, smoking candles, and closed blinds are some of the talisman-like figures that drift around Lee Piechocki’s silvery, smoldering series One Nightstand Black for The Hole. It seems that some kind of conjuring is taking place. Murky and mysterious, the pictures invite the presence of memory’s more cryptic cousin: dreams.