Aline Mare’s elegant, lush, and intensely moving work in Requiem: Aching for Acker is a tribute and an inspired exhibition of visual poetry – based on a poem. Inspired by the last writing from Mare’s long-time friend, the late Kathy Acker, these multi-media works are transcendent, a fitting visual legacy to a fierce spirit and writer.
At the Mark Kelley Gallery in Beyond Baroque through May 27th, this is a poignant and highly personal show, elliptical but relatable, moving and deep.
Mare describes the works as her own interpretation of Acker’s final poem, which beautifully merged the writer’s cancer diagnosis with Greek mythology. What Mare has done is create lush, elegiac, and glowing works; their darkness offset by qualities of light, like rays of hope shooting through the midnight of death.
On the stairs leading to the gallery space, Mare has sprinkled roses and broken glass, above which Acker’s poem is printed as a large, pink poster. Boxing gloves and bustier are suspended on another wall; Acker and Mare both are fierce, female, and fighters. The battle is for remembrance, expression, understanding, and life itself. It does not get any realer or more potent than this.
The artist’s images include the gatherings of nature: seeds and roots and lichen. It includes the legacy of fossils and stone hands and grave markers, the fragile humanity of scars from breast cancer survivors – Acker died of breast cancer – and the caress of angel’s wings.
But the touch of these wings is as much about the power of angels to crush our mortality as they are about succor; they are also emblematic of the power of art, whether it is the art of words or of visual images, to transcend death and our frail bodies.
The palette Mare employs is as rich and soft as worn velvet, the colors of moss and rust, of tarnished treasures and the ruby heart of seeds, blood, capillaries; the pulsation of life and light that beats back the eternal night.
The artist incorporates quotes from Acker’s heart-breaking and powerful poem beside her images, tying the quote “’Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels?’ I know the answer: no one.” to a haunting image of feathers, foam, seeds, and what could be human or plant matter. “Tell me: where does love come from? An angel is sitting on my face. To whom can I run?” is matched to an image with an iridescent purple and green wing rising from a scarred, natural shape that could be a wounded body or a ripening, about-to-erupt seed pod.
This is not the first time Mare has created work inspired by Acker. In 2000, she created a multi-media installation examining Acker’s life and battle against cancer. However, the works here may certainly be her most universal and visceral.
One of the glories of Mare’s work in this exhibition is the shining quality within the images, like the silver sheen beneath a tarnished surface. There is the patina of old gem stones, a mosaic of the natural and the dream-like, a tapestry with a dusty, faded, dusky hue, beneath which brilliant threads show. Her aim to create work that shapes the same female power, certain loss, and poignant vulnerability that Acker’s poem gestated in her has been fully realized.
These works are both illustrations of Acker’s poem and a new way of interpreting them, mixed media work that vibrates with passion, pathos, and connection, that innate connection we all share — to our tenuous, transient lives and the death we look to rise above. She captures echoes of eternity in dark but burnished visual moments.
Mike Kelley Gallery is located at 681 Venice Blvd., Venice.
An artist talk is scheduled for Saturday, May 19th at 2 p.m., with artist and writer Gary Brewer.
Regular gallery hours: Fri.-Sat., 3-7 p.m.; Sun., 2-7 p.m; through May 27.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis