PALIMPSESTS OF MEMORY: RECENT WORK BY TANIA BECKER

Tania Becker's mixed-media works have the palimpsestic structure of memory itself. Layers of paint, crayon, charcoal, and found objects supercede but only partially efface one another, much the way memories of old experiences make room for fresh ones without disappearing altogether. Becker compares her work to a journal of her travels and experiences; perhaps each canvas is like a page in a journal that has been erased and revised many times. Hints of earlier experiences glimpsed through the screen of more recent ones tempt us to delve beneath and recover those earlier events. The presence of images beneath the surfaces of Becker's canvases is more than implied: it is a powerful presence that gives the work resonance.

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD 

48" x 48"

Mixed Media on Canvas

Becker's work is not abstract in any simple sense. Through the layered structure of her work, she establishes a dialectic between the abstract and the concrete (not the figurative - the concrete). The found objects, some gathered on her travels, are the most concrete elements in her work, not just records of the past but actual physical remnants of the particular moments at which they were gathered. As records of experience, the layers beneath the surface become progressively less concrete. Like memory traces that persist in immediate experience, they are present, but not fully available. The concreteness of the found objects throws into relief the spectral presence of these other images, and vice-versa. Even as the found elements seem all the more present when contrasted with trace images, their very concreteness also creates a desire to probe beneath the surface, to discover the implied realities and thus restore concreteness to them.

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

24" X 24"

Mixed Media on Board

With Becker's love of travel in mind, I liken some of her works to vista seen through airplane windows, landscapes far below glimpsed fleetingly through layers of clouds. Even though we see the land discontinuously, we know it is there, concretely present. Occasionally, specific details emerge to reassure us of the reality of the ground beneath.

ONE STEP FORWARD...TWO STEPS BACK

24" X 24"

Mixed Media on Canvas

In Becker's work, the concrete presence of found objects, the specificity of certain colors, the implied geometrics underlying her compositions - which sometimes rise to the surface in the form of particular geometric figures (circles, squares, grids) - all serve to establish the presence and reality of the experiences undergirding her compositions even when they are glimpsed, as if through clouds.

Philip Auslander

Philip Auslander is a frequent contributor to ArtForum, Art Papers, and other publications. He is a professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology. His most recent book is Liveness: Performances in a Mediatized Culture, published by Routledge.

 

REMEMBER

36" x 36"

Mixed Media on Canvas