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Matthew Cox:
Aron Packer Gallery
We have German physician Wilhelm Roentgen to thank for the x-ray, discovered in 1895 and even at that early date, able to penetrate the body's mysteries and reveal the bony structures within. Among the first of Roentgen's radiographs was an image of his wife's hand, which reveals what is now a familiar type of see-through vision, the bones as solid elements nestled among transparent flesh. Since that time x-ray technology has been developed for its use in medical diagnostic imaging: practical, valuable, yet entirely clinical. The technology is complex, the principles simple. Different bodily tissues absorb the wavelengths of the electromagnetic x-ray radiation at differing rates, thus affecting a photographic plate placed behind the part being x-rayed, with bone, as densest, appearing light or white, softer tissues as gray or even absent altogether, subtracted away into black. Those who have had x-rays (or MRIs or CAT scans, for that matter) know that to take them for diagnosis is to carry them about as a sort of external symbol, devoid of personhood in the tight focus on the bone or organ under medical consideration: one becomes merely a doctor's case, a peek into the inner workings of a knee, a wrist, a lumbar spine. Indeed, without the careful labeling of the enclosing envelopes, it is easy to jumble one patient's films with another. In subtracting the flesh to permit that secret, interior view, x-rays subtract emotion, sensation, feeling, and all that physical evidence which makes individuality apparent. In Thread Into Plastic, artist Matthew Cox achieves a revivification of the clinical image, tantamount almost to a 'reverse x-ray'. His swathes of bright embroidery reflesh the ghostly bones and tissues, offering glimpses into the vivid three-dimensional world they represent. The results are lively, their quirky effectiveness due in part to the imaginative additions the artist gives to his anatomical re-creations. In Torso (embroidery thread and found x-ray: 13 x 16 in.: 2005) he embroiders not just the upwardly bent arm, not just the shimmering folds of its satiny blue sleeve, but the fingers' delicate grasp on a yellow daffodil, its stalk playfully poised over the right shoulder. The full profile, itself arising from no artistic impulse but from the mere medical necessities of the diagnostic positioning of the body, becomes a pose suggestive of the profile portraits of Renaissance women, an association strengthened by the anachronistic design of the blue sleeve with its tiny white border. These are actual x-ray films, those dark, durable plastic sheets familiar to anyone who has made a trip to the hospital with the hint of a fracture. In applying embroidery to the thick plastic Cox adds not only color and image, but a sense of softness and three-dimensional 'body' suggestive of living tissue. One could conceive of these works being done with paint, but they would not work as well; paint's flatness would lack the delicate tactile quality suggested by the embroidery stitches, would lack as well the associations one can draw between the act of embroidery, and the ideas of knitting, healing, and medical doctoring. The embroidery hues are a further vivification, contrasting the x-ray's inhuman, bluish gray with colors drawn from life and nature. The range of emotions span as much of a spectrum, at times achieved with suggestive props rather than direct references to personality. Femur with Gurney Buckle (embroidery thread and found x-ray: 13 x 17 in.: 2005) offers itself with a certain mischievous primness, the hands delicately drawing back the fabric of the dress or robe to reveal the spectral form of a femur with a steel clamp stark-white on the bone. New Born (embroidery thread and found x-ray: 9-1/2 x 9-1/2 in.: 2005) touches a different chord, the clinical x-ray of an infant given pathos with Cox's addition of an embroidered baby blanket. Its soft folds intensify the sense of nakedness and fragile vulnerability; the wires or tubes captured in the x-ray, not necessarily IVs (intravenous drips) though they do suggest it, add to that feeling of a small body, desperate for care. At other times the artist directly re-creates personhood on the plain plastic, reconstructing facial features and often, glimpses of backgrounds and settings suggesting the surrounding fabric of living world of which the individual is part. All at once, from a clinical object, the presence of facial features evokes personality, ambition, emotion -- invites self-comparison and empathy. Balanced between life and death, the woman of Skull Face (embroidery thread and found x-ray: 10 x 10-1/2 in.: 2005) gazes out with a direct, yet ambiguous stare. What is that expression one reads in her eyes? Challenge? Regret? An exhortation to live life more fully? Laughing Skeleton (embroidery thread and found x-ray: 10 x 20-3/4 in.: 2005) is divided neatly into bottom and top sections, the starkness of the radiograph, a cervical region and lower jaw with its toadstool luminescence on an x-rayed ground of barren black, is contrasted by the lavishness of the embroidered upper portion. The young man looks inward with thoughtful gaze; but around him, leaves flourish, the gentle rose and violet in the sky suggest a temperate, hazy evening, even the subject's hair seems to wriggle upward in tendrils of active liveliness. With these embroidered images Cox offers a glimpse into the possibilities represented by the sterile, shadowy, indifferent world of the radiology films. Though revivified, these images retain a sense of the inevitable mortality that haunts us all. And yet -- is it a memento morii -- or a memento vivii, if one may coin the term, a reminder to breathe in life and its sensations while we have it? Which is the reality, the living self the artist re-creates for each diagnostic film, or the bony structures the x-rays reveal, which will be all that remain once we are gone? Both. The interplay of oppositions and contrasts makes these lively works. Matthew Cox: Thread Into Plastic will be at Aron Packer Gallery through November 26, 2005. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. |
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