Marjorie Minkin Material Possibilities

Early in her career, Marjorie Minkin's primary concern was investigating ways to express the visual effects of light. The dramatic radiance of nature, particularly as it is manifest in the desert and the ocean, is often discernable her paintings. This fascination with light led to experimentation with many types of contemporary materials. Despite her interest in these materials, Minkin nevertheless remains grounded in classical ideals. She was particularly inspired by Greek and Indian historical sculptures encountered in her travels to these countries and visiting museums at home. For Minkin, a fragment of a Greek torso seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "although nearly an abstract form, seems alive and almost breathing" while a marble bodhisattva encountered at Kykuit, Rockefeller's mansion in the Hudson River Valley, "evokes an energy which seems to go beyond the physical in its relaxed and fluid pose." (1) It is a desire to translate concerns of light, movement and the body into an abstract language using a variety of materials that informs Minkin's work.

Minkin's earliest painting, influenced by Morris Louis, consisted of thinly layered sweeps of color laid down on rectangular canvases in configurations that offered up inherent figure/ground compositions. She experimented with shaped canvases and, in 1987, began working with Lexan, a clear industrial material that can be molded through the application of heat. Like earlier sculptors such as Eva Hesse and Keith Sonnier who transformed industrial materials, Minkin exploited the properties of this new age plastic, shaping and painting it to create specific textures, activate the surface and create reflections. It took years of experimenting to achieve the translucency and reflective qualities she desired. Today her innovative use of Lexan and acrylic paints (including recently developed light reflective pigments) has helped her achieve her goals. Then as now, her main concerns are both with process and the visual effects of light.

Minkin has been working with plastic for fifteen years and as her control of the process has been perfected, the reading of the work has expanded. From the beginning, these molded Lexan pieces, curved like torsos in contrapposto positions, had inherent figural references. The paint sometimes enhanced this interpretation and other times gave the reading a geographic tenor, like a fragment of a relief map complete with mountains, valleys and inlets... "In the Lexan work, the flow of paint marks the topography of the molded shape," Minkin has said, "I am interested in this mapping as an intuitive response to form." (2)

In a recent works, such as Nadi, 2001 and Ming, 2001, the figural references are less overt. Minkin pours acrylic resins on the backside of the work, allowing the color to flow through the naturally formed channels. One can almost feel the natural flow of water Ð the way it serpentines like a river or spirals back on itself like tidal pool. The stream of paint emulates nature. In Ming, she worked with a single, pure color, ultramarine. Light shines through both plastic and pigment, giving off a radiant light that glows like the most beautiful sapphire. Here the reference seems microcosmic, as if we are looking at cells or the flow of blood through arteries and veins. Minkin has left the larger body and gone inside. Other examples are less specific and become more of a riff on formal qualities such as Wu T'ung Tree, 2001 and Rocket, 2001 which juxtapose poured paint and surface collages of dried paint applied to the surfaces. This play of visual phenomena is for Minkin "an exercise in achieving balance" (3) between the different aspects of abstract painting: translucence/opacity, light/dark and gloss/matte. No paint is applied on the molded Lexan in Etheric Being, 2001, giving the play of light and shadow prominence. The areas where the plastic has been heated is both curved and textured, its sparkle radiating an ambient light. Because of its minimal purity, the viewer experiences the piece beyond it physical mass, through the shadows and reflections cast on the wall, ceiling and floor. It expands beyond itself into the environment. This experience, which has been referred to as the "criterion of coexistence," is elliptical, leaving space for the viewer to complete the experience.

Since the mid-eighties, Minkin has worked simultaneously on the Lexan wall pieces and the acrylic canvases. In many ways they can be seen as two different approaches, although some of the process and certainly much of the artistic vision overlaps. In both, transparency and the rendering of light is a primary goal but it was only until recent developments in the technology of acrylic mediums and through experimentation that Minkin could achieve the translucency she was seeking in her canvas work. She has expanded her practice of suspending colored pigments in clear resins on the plastic to her paintings on canvas to accomplish this surface transparency.

Formal concerns, such as gesture, texture and the reflective surfaces are present in both. Yet, because of the physical differences between the two, one's visual engagement is different. They provide different experiences. The Lexan pieces, which cast shadows and reflections that take the viewer's experience beyond the physical mass, ultimately remain abstract ruminations on color and light. In many ways, the canvas paintings are grounded in nature, more literal renderings, albeit abstract, of land and sea scapes, enhanced no doubt by their horizontal orientation. North Sea, 2001, is a beautiful example of how Minkin's paintings can be at once a translation of nature, in this case the sea, and a phenomenological experience of the wind and waves, achieved through aggressive brushstrokes, surface texture and gloss surface. One thinks of the oil paintings of Marsden Hartley, the moodiness of Albert Pinkham Ryder's night seascapes or more recently, the waterfall paintings of Pat Steir where the paint becomes the water falling. Fuji, 2001, is equally referential to the landscape while Blue Lausanne, 2001 and Cosmic Wave, 2001, can be seen as abstract ruminations on wind and air currents. In the Lexan work and the acrylic paintings, Minkin's interpretation of the world is both intuitive and rational. Her process relies upon skilled technical capabilities and informed decision-making, yet incorporates the possibility of chance. These techniques take full advantage of the properties inherent in the materials--such as the malleability of the heated plastic and the flow of the poured acrylic mediums--to evoke the forces of nature, giving viewers the opportunity for their own intuitive response.

Sue Scott an independent curator and writer living in New York City.

1. Email from artist to author, August 15, 2001.
2. Email from artist to author, February, 22, 2002.
3. Ibid.

Nadi

Wu T'ung Tree

Rocket

North Sea