This exhibition, Petal Storm Memory presents a body of work by the artist Chie Fueki, a painter who was born in Japan, raised in Brazil, and came to the United States for her college and graduate art education. She lives and works in Beacon, New York with her husband, the painter Joshua Marsh. The paintings and drawings on view are complex both technically and philosophically. The work deals with issues of place, memory, and longing. Through a laborious and unique process that is more like cinematic montage than the pictorial process of collage, Fueki complicates notions of landscape and portraiture by intimating the ways that time and memory can simultaneously distort and rectify the ways in which we build and maintain memories of places and people — and of memory itself.

In the artist’s own words:

“I aim for radical hybridity and co-existence. In my paintings I synthesize the materials that I collect through an ornamental language. I experienced such hybridity in traditions like the Candomblé; a spiritual blend of West African and Roman Catholic beliefs and rituals. The irreconcilable contradictions between the Cathedral, the Carnaval, and modern city in Brazil continues to drive my engagement with the universal languages that constitute our collective unconscious. One where the ghosts of Western art history, Japanese animation, South American mysticism, Ukiyo-E prints, Christian symbolism and artifacts from our daily, contemporary experience can float in a state of suspended animation.”

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s brief analysis of the relationship of map and territory may act as a more appropriate introduction to Fueki’s work:

“Any understanding of any territory is based on one or more sensory channels reporting adequately but imperfectly: We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. ... Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.”

Or perhaps the best introduction to her work can be found in the words of two of the great Japanese haiku masters, the poets Kobayashi Issa and Matsuo Basho:

“How many, many things
They call to mind
These cherry-blossoms!”
–Basho

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms
–Issa