"Mother Memory" (Art Exhibit Series, 8/10)
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.
Shahé Mankerian’s poems rarely exceed one page. They don’t need to be longer. They not only have a gift for synthesis—they are overarching, complete. They can tell a story that starts there, in that very corner (often sparked by a detail, prompting the narrative to espouse an irreversible parable and inevitably reach the target), and ends right where silence begins, where it wouldn’t be possible, anyway, to add a single word. Still, the tone is light, almost jocular, even when relating horrors and paradoxes of growing up in Beirut under the bombs. War-stricken Lebanon in the nineteen-seventies, immigration in the US, family dynamics stretched across two cultures are the main themes—tightly intertwined—of Mankerian’s oeuvre. Does the keen, empathetic gaze the poet casts on his mother derive from a sensibility exacerbated by trauma, or is it the result of perspective shifts due to the passage from culture to culture, and the consequent quaking of rules that could otherwise seem immutable? Both the war, with its daily burden of absurd grief, cruelty and destruction, and the leap from a behavioral code to a completely different one, undermine the foundations of acquired beliefs, asking to the mind and heart to reconsider it all, start anew. Hence, in this as in many other instances, the poet swiftly rewinds the film and retrieves the first photogram, to give it another good look—realizing that the war outside might reflect unseen injustice kept beyond closed doors, victims that no one sings.
Captured
by Shahé Mankerian
Mother did not always have Medusa curls.
The black and white picture before marriage
shows mother smiling, content, with darker hair,
with generous lips, her eyes in focus.
This was mother before marriage, before 1964,
before Father serenaded her in jazz clubs
all along the rocky seashores of Raoushé.
This was mother with no children, no peacock
husband, no war in Lebanon. This was her
with bruisless neck and tumorless breast.
This was a woman ageless. She did not drive;
she walked, shooting dust on peacocks.
Her head erect, not titled or dyed. This was
a woman I did not know, existed once,
before this picture, smiled, and was captured.
Gina Lawson | Brimming with Regalia | ceramic | 42” x 21” x 12” | 2023
Gina Lawson’s sculptures straddle and often combine the macro and the microscopic. They always involve the human figure, but unpredictably so—sometimes as a landscape, sometimes as a detail, now scenery, now arabesque or ornament. Proportions nonchalantly shift also within the bodies. This or that part is magnified... a foot, a mouth, an ear—often, the entire head, hence suggesting that whatever attaches itself, emerges from, grows around it, is the materialization of thoughts, dreams or, indeed, memories. Lawson’s figures literally incorporate their narrative. They allow it to inhabit them, without ever claiming a leading role—rather, choosing to share the limelight with manifold profusion of animal and vegetal forms, myriad objects, other figures, other bodies, other gazes and other points of views. Thus are born Lawson’s small and large fantastical worlds. At times vertical, stacked in totemic fashion, they more often espouse unpredictable parables, disregarding gravity laws and enamored, instead, with paradox—free like lianas in the Amazonian forest, or like clouds in the sky. But this peremptory embodiment of the imagined-and-remembered isn’t all that connects Lawson’s work to our current theme. I also find the peculiar quality of her female figures very relevant. They are often multiple, intertwined and somehow “transfused,” as if perennially engendering each other, just as they ceaselessly birth the kaleidoscopic universe that surrounds them. Let’s recall that they are made of earth. Lawson’s medium (and technique) of choice is consistently terracotta, of which the warm tone intentionally peers through lightly, fluidly applied under-glazes, of which the rough and irregular texture, the artist says, “creates a sense of history.” A fertile earth, like the ground on which Lawson’s creatures rest—almost weightless, despite a primal strength they bear quietly, in subdued, casual fashion. These huge-eyed women look away—askew, upward, at a tiny speck on the horizon. These women with wide-open eyes look inside.
Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena and serves as the director of mentorship at the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). He has been honored with the Los Angeles Music Center’s BRAVO Award for innovation in arts education. His debut poetry collection, History of Forgetfulness, was a finalist in multiple competitions, including the Bibby First Book Competition, Crab Orchard Poetry Open Competition, Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Award, White Pine Press Poetry Prize, Julie Suk Award (longlist finalist), and a semifinalist for the Khayrallah Prize for Best Artistic Expressions of Lebanon and the Lebanese Diaspora. https://www.instagram.com/shahemankerian/
Gina Lawson works in the Los Angeles area and lives with her family in Ontario, California. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan and studied with the late Paul Soldner for her MFA in Ceramics from the Claremont Graduate University. Gina currently teaches Ceramics at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her works are in prestigious collections throughout the United States. https://www.ginalawsonegan.com/
