Maria Park “Present Matter”

Present Matter is a collection of works by Maria Park that explores protocol, legibility, and duration as they relate to the interruptions surrounding our lives. The works were made over the past four years as a way to face the sequences of medical emergencies and continuing uncertainties. During this time, as Park looked for signs between life and death, the work became more and more about order and stillness.

Part of her Imprint series, Maria Park made the first OCR-A chart painting in 2014, the year her late partner and sometime collaborator Branden Hookway was diagnosed with an advanced stage of a rare cancer. The stark and crisp organization of the font, which was developed in the early days of computer optical character recognition as one that could be read by both computers and humans, counterpoised the endless questions occupying their thoughts and conversations. A is A, b is b, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Drawn to the intentional yet playful presence of the characters, Park reverse painted them on transparent sheets of plexiglass in subtle shades of black, the difference aimed to be felt rather than seen.

Maria Park, Imprint 5, 2019
Acrylic reverse painted on
Plexiglass and mounted on EPS
19.5 x 25.5 inches

When Park accidentally fell on an icy pavement in 2019, the matter-of-factness of the charts became crumpled, disrupting the flow of the font. The painting of the crumpled charts in various forms paralleled the long recovery process involving extensive vision and vestibular therapy, referencing crumpling’s far-from-equilibrium physical process guided by strange rules and non-linear effects. While her vision was compromised with photosensitivity, she saw instead strange colors, and the OCR-A letters and numbers floating across and hiding behind the paper folds.

Maria Park, Obsidian, 2019,
Acrylic and glitter reverse painted on
Plexiglass and mounted on EPS
19 x 20.5 inches

Shortly after the concussion occurred, Park found a piece of obsidian that held a striking resemblance to the crumpled form painted as Imprint 5. It was clear to her why obsidian has accompanied human society from its emergence. The deep reflective black of the volcanic glass emphatically signals its potential to be of use, both as a tool and an ornament, but it also operated somewhat like a sign with its strong resonance to a work she had just finished.

Maria Park, Obsidian, Pyrite, Silicon, Jasper, Fluorite, 2019-2020
Acrylic and glitter reverse painted on
Plexiglass and mounted on EPS

Since this time, Park has been collecting and painting different minerals as singularities, imagined as symbols in her own periodic chart. The paintings are cut to the exact dimensions of the minerals, emphasizing their presence over the surface. For example, Silicon, the basis of digital computation, hovers between its determined finite state and its optically mutable surface. Pyrite, which uses mica gold flakes, catches light from different angles, its subtle flickers meant to act as the painting’s acknowledgement of the viewer’s presence. Others painted to date include Fluorite, Jasper, Calcite, Quartz, and Herkimer, the last of which was based on a stone found during her family’s visit to the diamond mine in upstate New York.

Maria Park, Herkimer, 2022
Acrylic reverse painted on
Plexiglass and mounted on EPS
Dimensions and configuration variable

Park’s detailed reverse painting process is methodical with each work manifested as an evidence of looking; geologic time cut into stencils and colors. “In this past year, as the end of my partner’s life loomed closer,” says Park, “time became even more abstract. What is a month or day when it’s the rest of one’s life? I was not prepared to know how total an absence feels when Branden died this past August, our lives almost seeming to have been a dream. As time collapsed into the past, these ‘rocks’ reinserted space between my memories, making a path back to the present, both crystalline and intermediary.”

Maria Park and Branden Hookway, Crystal 5, 2019-20
Acrylic, plywood, and plexiglass
8.75 x 11 x 2 inches

Included in this exhibition are cloud sculptures made during the past eight years, developed after Sight Plan (2016), a public project focusing on skies, displayed on wall mounted shelves next to remnants of broken measuring cups. The play of light and shadow, which reveals the facets and contours, corresponds to another work in the exhibition titled Field Diagram. This is part of the most recent collaborative project with Park’s late partner based on an early twentieth century atlas of crystal diagrams, built from layers of 3D-milled plywood and plexiglass and fitted together like a puzzle. Together, these works add a type of material dimension to the memory of a life lived under pressure.