Diversions LA

Opening October 9^th, and closing on Halloween, it’s only right that Joy Ray should offer new works with a beautifully haunting theme – Ghost Visions.

“I think of ghosts as a kind of ambassador to an unseen world,” Ray says. “This could be an actual ghost, or a dream, premonition, or intuition, one of those moments of strangeness that makes us aware of the fact we’re surrounded by the mysterious at all times.”

Ray’s work often brings elements of mystery, magic, and portent. This show is a foray into new materials and approach. Her work has always been highly textural, merging paint and textile elements, including elements of half-hidden text, and moving beyond paper or canvas into layers of additional mediums. But this show explores farther.

According to Ray “This idea of the mysterious came to me in a couple of different ways. I see this show as a kind of controlled lab experiment, one that invites a participation into the unknown world. One of the ways I get at this are through materials.”

This exhibition features a number of materials Ray purchased at thrift stores. “They have a past life, and I don’t know what that past life is,” she explains. “Do these materials, these garments, carry with them hints of what their former life was? I think they do.”

She selected old jeans as her primary fabric. “I read somewhere [that] at any given point of time 50% of the world’s population is wearing jeans. They are kind of a universal garment in a way; they’re pretty intimate and a beautiful fabric to work with. We also have a kind of love/hate relationship with them.”

Along with the fabric Ray uses in Ghost Visions, she is also featuring sculptures that “involve rusted metal and metal. I create the metal piece and the conditions in which it can rest, and I start and stop the rest of the process. Something else is really controlling it from there.” Otherworldly, indeed. She adds “That is the mysterious coming in, it’s a process in which it collaborates with me, so that the textures, and colors, it’s all a collaboration I suppose. I can see that mysteriousness coming to me.”

Her standing, rectangular “Ghost Signatures” series, which comprises one part of the upcoming exhibition looks like the phantom scrawl of a ghost, both art and a form of text that is unreadable to most humans. Excitingly kinetic, they are different that other, past work of Ray’s.

She compares the process in creating them to “almost like reading tea leaves. There’s a ritual and process involved. You make the tea, you pour it in the cup, and at the end, there’s just the tea leaves left. You are kind of left to make something of that, perhaps a message in them, or perhaps they are just tea leaves. It’s up to you.”  

She feels as if she is “creating a space in which these ‘perhaps messages’ can come through and then we can see what we can glean from those.”

To the viewer they evoke memories of ocean waves, or half-heard words on staticky radios, or the soft shadowed touch of a hand while drifting into sleep. And they also resemble a conversation that is not quite intelligible but real nonetheless – as if comprised of a completely different language outside intellectual understanding but rooted in the spiritual.

“Creating these smaller metal pieces took place in part through an MFA program I am doing at the Chicago School of the Arts Institute. I was there for six weeks, and I got to experiment with their amazing equipment, which lent itself to the creation of the smaller pieces,” she relates.

Having worked with the idea of string, she dropped it into the shape of cursive handwriting that “looks like writing but is not readable.” She then took photographs of the string in that shape, and cut these images into the metal pieces using a CMT plasma cutter.

“It’s a different process for me. In thinking about it, going from the string, a simple material that I love, on that is kind of a mid-century, very basic American material, and converting it to steel that shows the absence of the that string through the cut out, the absence spoke to me.” She says “I’m not quite sure that any of it means yet, but there is an echo. The absence of the string is kind of like the ghost of the string.”

Each piece is approximately 4 x 11” and the patterns are cut into the steel. She plans to position them in the back gallery at Shockboxx, “with the lights out, and back-lit so they kind of flow – at least that is my plan,” she attests.

Ray has approximately 40 of the small metal sculptures in the show, and approximately 15 mixed media paintings. Among the latter are works that include elliptical text, such as “Lost Transmission,” and “Relic,” as well as the geometric patterns on works such as “Seen Not Seen” in which it appears text could reside but is temporarily absent, which echoes her metal work process.

Also included in the show is a series of works which are influenced by Ray’s drop cloths. “The spaces that inspired this work have in a way gotten small and more intimate. When I make paintings, I work flat on the ground on a drop cloth. I noticed that when I was painting, I was making two paintings – the incidental marks on the drop cloth that had a cool energy to them, and the painting itself. And I thought what if I intentionally make those marks on canvas, the marks taken from the incidental marks on my drop cloths and turn them into the focus of my art intentionally. In this way,” she notes, “the work represents my surroundings as interpreted by my little drop cloth on the floor.”

Ray reveals that she is interested to see how these drop-cloth pieces are seen by viewers. “I think the next work I’ll be doing will be pulled in that direction. I think the drop cloth is in a way my studio in a suitcase, which creates more intimacy in my work, but perhaps it’s a smaller focus that’s more universal.”

While in the past Ray has focused on the Hawaiian iconography that reflects her home for at least part of the year, this work changes things up. However, she notes “There are some through lines. I’m very influenced by previous work in that way, but this is less rooted in the islands.”

She describes Ghost Visions as “Experimental and playful. Despite the dark color palette that I tend to gravitate toward, there’s a kind of playfulness to this body of work that’s a little newer to me. I think being a part of the MFA process encouraged experimentation.”

Ray asserts that she views this body of work as “the beginning of something really exciting, the first step on a really exciting road. I don’t know where it is going to lead yet.”

Perhaps, into other worlds. 

The exhibition will be opening at Shockboxx October 8^th; the in-person reception will be on the 9^th starting at 6 p.m. An artist talk with critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot will take place during the shows run; that event will be virtual and include a seasonally appropriate discussion of ghost stories, tarot, Ouija boards, and ghost signatures.

Shockboxx is located at 636 Cypress Ave. in Hermosa Beach, Calif.

• Genie Davis; photographs provided by the artist