"Mother Memory" (Art Exhibit Series, 2/10)
Toti O’Brien
The following is part of the Mother Memory art exhibit series, a pairing of literature with art curated by the exhibitor, Toti O’Brien. Oyster River Pages is pleased to present this series in weekly installments.
Miriam Sagan’s words like to move swiftly and freely, covering as much territory as they can. They convey a poetics of travel even when they “stay in place”—so to speak—as they are always infused with the imprint that history, migrations, otherness of all kinds, leave onto the natural and especially the manmade environment. In her writing, the memories that invariably imbue the present moment (stretching its contours, thickening it with hidden harmonies and muted, secret descants) are ancient. They embrace manifold eras and cultures, though they often linger around specific times/events/places—for instance, the Central European Jewish diaspora (from the pogroms to the Holocaust) or the Spanish colonization of Central America (to which also New Mexico, Arizona and California belong). Memory flares up at the slightest spark—a statue, a monument, or the emptiness of a dismantled building—the profile of a face, an accent, or a tombstone—a map, or a broken toy abandoned on a dry riverbed. Microcosm and macrocosm are witnessed and deciphered as one, patched together and painstakingly mended, to be carefully passed down to the next generation. The mother-daughter relationship is a backbone that runs through Sagan’s entire oeuvre—subtle, under skin, like an invisible seam. It’s a vital bond, essential and yet respectful (in the original sense of the term), intense and simultaneously delicate, light.
My Daughter in the Pacific
by Miriam Sagan
My only daughter, almost 35
Stands facing the Pacific
As wave after wave
Knocks her down
In the high surf
My son-in-law is counting
I can feel it
How many seconds
She is underwater
Until she emerges again
“Wave: 3,” he mutters
Meaning: Isabel: 0
Has he forgotten
What she was like in labor
As they each pulled
At the end of a rope
And she groaned, rising up
Then curling down
Now she stands dripping sand
Fro her long dark hair
And he says: I married a stranger
As if she’s turned into
A goddess, or a seal
As if she was still the child
Who’d sneak deeper oceanward
Under the worried squinting frown
Of her grandmother, my mother
She laughs, she turns, she comes back out
Resembling her old self
But in the way of all women, so
That is to say—not quite.
Nadege Monchera Baer | River | Pencil, acrylic on red velum | 39.5” x 27.5” | 2023
When I thought of Monchera Baer, I recalled large artworks on paper from a few years ago, mostly red—a powerful hue, and yet muted, as it was minutely applied with the tiniest marks and infinite patience, similar to that of the weavers of ancient rugs. As if from an archeological dig (sifting earth crumb by crumb), human figures slowly emerged—reclined, semi-reclined, incomplete, more or less decipherable. Those blurred silhouettes, both visible and concealed, following the vagaries of light, point of view and focus, echoed the very fashion in which memory works. The intricate scarlet web, on the other hand, made me think of thin vessels, capillaries, where DNA travels with its mysterious legacy and secret codes.
Among several pieces included in the show, I chose to share River, as it adds to the qualities I described an unusual feature. White on red, it displays an inverted color pattern, as for an old film negative—it’s a scar, rather than a wound. Through the folds that obscure the identity of the female figure, I see the shape of a fetus—a potential of birth, perhaps something to be unveiled, or revealed.
Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the mother/daughter creative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) in venues ranging from RV parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women's Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces. miriamswell.wordpress.com
If we don’t stop to quibble with the math, Nadege Monchera Baer is half French, half Italian and half Californian. She attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, possibly channeling a bit of her Venice-born father’s interest in painting. Then, she met legendary film director Federico Fellini in Rome, and the encounter led to a short stint as an actress, plus a number of roles behind the scenes. More importantly, his passion and insistence on staying true to a personal vision left a long-lasting legacy in terms of how artists can interact with the world. A few years later, Monchera Baer was awarded the Prix Villa Medicis and two international residencies, in Berlin and New York. She eventually moved to Los Angeles where she currently resides. Less bound by European history and nurtured by the lively local scene, her work moved beyond non-objective abstraction, expanding into a number of interwoven motifs. Various series, pursuing different directions, were paused and resumed, sometimes in turns and sometimes simultaneously. Alternating between figurative realism and abstraction, often merging the two to achieve unique combinations, Monchera-Baer has frequently shown in L.A. and the surrounding regions as well as in France, Italy, Germany and Japan. @venezianaparisla
