Poetry Has Left Me
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Marionne Contreras
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“Poetry has left me” is not a lament. It is not a statement of despair. Often when recalling the selves we used to be, we think of what has been lost. We see these versions of ourselves passing us by as if washed away by a current, only to be felt as receding waves.
Yet “Poetry has left me” is not a statement in retrospect. But rather, one of love.
Marionne Contreras’ “Poetry Has Left Me,” is an ode to the self she can no longer inhabit. Rather than let it be washed away, she clings to it almost too needily. In her stubborn refusal to let go, she wills it into a new, otherworldly existence. A form that transcends notions of past selves. One that can exist alongside the self she is now.
The show takes its title from the centerpiece “Poetry Has Left Me,” a tufted work with text that reads: “Poetry has left me for a younger, sadder girl with better daddy issues and an aching hunger for love.” The thought is as much elegiac as it is tongue-in-cheek. Contreras could no longer catch the poetic flow that used to stir her as it has already taken her onto a different path. So she mourns – pettily, in her words. Looking upon a self we can never meet again, sometimes the humor bleeds through. We may see it as self-deprecating. But for Contreras, the work is an affectionate diss at the sad girl she no longer is anymore.
Suspended tapestries call to question our notions of truth. In “To make a saint out of a part girl, part liar, part rage ball, part crier,” layered narratives align in the eye of the viewer. Similarly, what truths align in our own eyes may be seen as fabrications in the eyes of others. Another diss of endearment at the “part girl” she was, Contreras sees through her veneer of layered truths and all the drama that once wove its way through them.
Amid Contreras’ bright and decorative colors is a simple gesture. Like giving a flower to a friend, she imbues her works with a sense that within their ornamentation is an act of love. In “O god, turn me into something beautiful,” seemingly organic vessels, both familiar and alien in form, grow alive and free, guided only by the artist’s intuitive wish for an existence of beauty of their own accord.
There is delicate irony in “Poetry Has Left Me,” for despite underlining the poetry that has “left” we now see a new kind of poetry. A new form of expression that, like the artist herself, does not replace the old form, but romanticizes it, allowing it to live on as a force of its own. In Contreras’ works, we do not see a parting of ways or nostalgia for the past, but an acceptance. An acceptance that we never really leave the selves we used to be, and that they always exist alongside us as an ethereal essence. We can look upon this “sadder girl” not with grief, but with wonder, humor, and a warmth that lives on.
– Words by Mara Fabella
