There’s something simultaneously ecstatic and terrifying about Caryn Martin’s 60-foot installation, “The Skin of Water,” on view through February 22 at the Academy Art Museum. Luminous, menacing and strangely beautiful, it makes you feel as if you’re deep underwater looking up into wildly churning waves. Yards and yards of crumpled, color-stained tracing paper confront you and sweep your imagination into a strange, shifting underworld of color, shadow and light.
Martin is a printmaker on steroids. Predominantly blue but rhythmically shifting into shades of translucent pink and sooty gray tinged with bits of purple, salmon or yellow, this work was created from four years’ worth of abstract monoprints printed on large sheets of tracing paper. It might be mistaken for a comically enormous mass of discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning, but you’ll quickly get caught up in the cumulative effect of its subtle colors and intricate details as they conjure both the staggering vastness of the sea and the power of recent storms triggered by our changing climate.
There’s nothing to hold on to here. Everything seems in motion, every creased and crinkly swirl of paper holding colors and textures that shift and shimmer as you walk by, shadows opening to reveal more chaos in their depths, light gleaming from deep within. Suggesting wild landscapes, ghostly figures, caves, rain, and stormy weather, the drips and spatters of printed ink draw you in to search out intimate details, even as they confound you with the sheer multitude of their particulars.
Fragile, translucent, sometimes gloomy, sometimes incandescent, this installation radiates ephemerality, all the more so because it stretches across the west-facing windows above the museum’s courtyard. With each passing hour and every passing cloud, its colors and luminosity alter in concert with the sun’s changing position in the sky and the restless moods of the weather.
This is a temporary, site-specific artwork that will cease to exist when the show closes. In a culture focused on permanence and the monetary value of art, Martin’s mode of working (like that of many installation artists) is counterintuitive. Tracing paper, itself an ephemeral material, easily creased or torn, is generally used only in the early, exploratory stages of an artwork’s creation. As a fragile, two-dimensional material altered into three dimensions, it’s obvious its existence can’t be sustained, and this fragility is part of the drama.
There’s something about its transitory nature that makes this installation call to mind the processes of change affecting our oceans and our environment in general. Invoking the untamable forces of nature through its massive sweeps of mottled blue abruptly shifting to other watery hues, it presents an almost theatrical vision of what it may be like to live in the chaos created by climate change.
In a powerful postscript, a series of faces are casually tacked to the wall opposite the installation. Entitled “Faces/Veils,” these are also ink monotypes printed on tracing paper in haunting shades of gray. Unsmiling, they are like faces seen through a rainy window or perhaps through smoke or tears. It is as if they are silent witnesses are dissolving before our eyes.
Despite the elements of warning and of sadness in this show, it is also full of joy. The pure energy of the large installation’s swirling colors, light and shadows is mesmerizing, as is its almost obsessive visual complexity. Caught in a moment of change, of passing from one state to another, it invokes the continuity and interconnectedness of life on earth and how everything that exists is evidence of what came before and inevitably holds the seeds of what is to come.
