Mary Ann Peters
Mary Ann Peters in her exhibition Myself Inside Your Story explores the often untold stories of migrants from the middle east. Grant funded trips took her all over the world to study archives in places where Arab communities reside. She is a Lebanese American woman and while not a migrant herself her works reflect the actual documents of Arab migrants. Her pieces took many forms and encompassed mediums from painting to drawing to sculpture. She uses gouache, fabric, gel pens, found objects and so much more.
The first thing about her work that caught my eye was the unfinished qualities of her paintings. Her gouache and watercolor paintings are basically yellow underpaintings with small filled in details. The land depicted is barren and the structures seem like they were put together in a hurry. All together they give a feeling of unfamiliarity and a lack of time to process the surroundings. She is able to capture detail while also leaving a lot to the imagination. The paintings all have varied textures while still having very little detail. These pieces were hung around the gallery space and they framed the more conceptual ideas shown in her exhibition. My favorite piece from this series was Way Station (2019). The painting depicts a barren landscape, the trees are bare and the land feels harsh. Despite the unfinished quality of the piece the landscape is surprisingly moving. Another piece from the series I really enjoyed was called Traveler (2019). In the center of the piece there is a person carrying a blue backpack. This was the only piece of color included in the painting. I interpreted it as the only familiar thing within the travelers surrounding was their own possessions. The rest of the piece is completely unrendered with only a glimpse of two dog-like animals and a ragged structure.
As I moved around the exhibition I was presented with two primarily fabric pieces from her Impossible Monument series: The Threads that Bind (2023) and Flotsam (2015). I appreciated the attention on the fabric industry and I do believe that it is an important topic to discuss but The Threads that Bind was not super compelling to me. The work itself just presents the fabrics and the names together as a reminder of how they came to be but without the description I would not have gathered that this called attention to the conditions that these women face. To me there is an element missing that would have brought more attention to the complex issue. The melting glycerine does begin to lift the veil on these issues but does nothing to show the condition these women work in or the need for this work. Flotsam on the other hand was one of my favorite pieces. The piece includes a fishing net suspended over the audience that contains a multitude of objects like shoes, stuffed animals and clothing. It captures the little things people choose to carry with them on their journey. The objects are familiar and I think that humanized an experience that I personally am not familiar with. At first I took the piece more literally thinking about losing objects along the migration path but in reflection it encapsulates the loss of home. Although these objects were not actually lost to the sea, it made me sad to think about all the things and people that had to be left behind for families forced to emigrate. The sorrow and loss they must have felt was truly captured in this piece.
Around to the right I came across my favorite pieces from this entire exhibition. There were three pieces from her Trembling Turf series, made during a residency in Beirut, that were completely different from her other work. From afar these pieces look like white and gray airbrush over black clay board but up close it is revealed that the effect is created by thousands of small white gel lines. I stared at these pieces for about ten minutes moving back and forth to see the illusion. The amount of time these pieces must have taken was so impressive to me. With her lines she is able to create such impressive textures that vary from piece to piece. The white on black made the pieces feel like waves invisible to the naked eye. In doing more research on these pieces I found that she did actually use a sonogram like device to find things that were buried. In an interview for the University of Washington magazine she is quoted as saying “All of the drawings, except for one, have a pulse embedded within them”.
On the far side of the exhibition space an entire wall was dedicated to her myriad of notes and studies. I could see elements of her finished pieces in these notes and it was very interesting to see how they changed over the course of their creation. Most of the studies were done in watercolor and many of them were experiments with texture and color that appear in her paintings. The notes were scattered across all types of surfaces and while to an outsider they might seem scattered it was clear she was thinking through each element of her pieces. Her dedication to these studies was quite inspiring and made her pieces seem even more thought out and carefully planned. This was a great addition to the exhibition and I wish more galleries would show the artistic process like this.
Overall I did enjoy this show although I have never not enjoyed an art exhibition. Her work explored a topic that I was not super familiar with and it felt like great insight into her studies. Her expansive use of multiple mediums was very impressive and i would love to see more of her work.
