Maria T.D. Inocencio: It’s Like This Every Day

Thirty One Days  & Going Around   

by Linda Wysong

Maria T.D. Inocencio’s exhibition at Gallery Nine entitled, It’s Like This Every Day is a stunningly beautiful contemplation of daily movement and accumulated memories. Charting her trips around the city and recording colors that come to her attention, Inocencio documents her experience and acknowledges that public space is always understood through a personal lens. The line between public and private is gossamer thin and every street is a stream of overlapping individual experiences.

Going Around is a large symmetrical painting with stylized, looped forms that depict the paths of Maria’s frequent errands. At first glance the work appears to be a formal image. The brightly colored elongated shapes fan out like a flower on the irregularly shaped canvas. There is an abstract sense of order and visual satisfaction. Yet when one comes closer and understands that each color and pattern refers to a repeated journey, the work takes on new meaning. The painting evokes time and travel and encourages us to consider mapping both as public information and an internal mechanism for understanding our constantly shifting perspective.

Going Around 2011 72” x 84” x 1 1/8” wood, acrylic, paper, glue

The second piece in the exhibition, Thirty-One Days is an even more direct document of experience. It is composed of 31 panels (12” x12” each) arranged to reflect a calendar page – October 2010. Each panel is filled with horizontal strips of color that correspond to the hues Ms. Inocencio observed on that particular fall day. Once again, when the painting is seen from across the room, it can be understood as an example of Modernist abstraction but that reading dissolves upon closer inspection. A single line of text has been hand written on each color recording the time and place the hue was observed. On October 1, there are eight colors and eight notes including – “7:43 AM Slanted Orange Light on Buildings I-84 before NE 33 Driving to school” and “ 4:40 PM Flower NE 21st & NE Prescott Leaving David’s house”.

Thirty-One Days, 2011, 72” x 84” x 1 1/8,” wood, acrylic paint, paper, glue

When discussing her work, Inocencio credits the experience of having children as the impetus for both the appreciation of the quotidian and her methodology. Caring for young children evokes an enjoyment of the small pleasures of life. But it can also constrict one’s schedule and mandate working in the short pauses between their meals, walks, and play. Ms. Inocencio turned these time limitations into an asset nurturing her art, as well as her children.

Maria draws on 2 established artistic traditions: (1) art as a ‘Daily Practice’ and (2) the art of walking associated with the French term, Le Flaneur. Her method of systematic recording builds on the vocabulary of a ‘Daily Practice’ and shares the analytical attitude of early conceptualist artists such as On Kawara with his series entitled Today. This work began in February 1973 and since then he has painted the date on an 8″ x 10″ canvas every single day, continually affirming his existence. Inocencio’s delicate touch and dispassionate tone more closely recall the German artist Hannah Darboven. Using the framework of the grid, Hannah Darboven created an Untitled series (1968) derived from hand written computations based on the date. Darboven’s life long practice chronicles existence and evokes the passage of time as she carefully marks each day. While this numerical practice dwells in the realm of systems and abstraction, Maria Inocencio’s work is firmly rooted in the physical world.

Hannah Darboven, Untitled, 1968 – calendar computations

Maria’s intuitive observations drawn from the streets of Portland recall the tradition of Le Flaneur as articulated by the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. In the 19th century Le Flaneur was the single gentleman who strolled the urban streets developing the act of observation into an art form. He was simultaneously the detached eye and a participant in the collective life of the city. This idea of art as participatory and intimately connected to daily life continues to be relevant and Thirty-One Days is a dynamic example.

Public space is often presented through the vocabulary of urban planning with its language of maps, zoning, transportation corridors, and economic development. Urban planning is essential but cities are composed of millions of individuals walking to the store and smelling the flowers. Maria Inocencio brings this truth to our attention and shares her vision of a daily routine as compelling and beautiful.

“ While Thirty-One Days is a direct document of time and experience, Going Around tries to make sense of both. … (It) follows a circular pattern, layering and weaving color and line, the way our memory rearranges images and thoughts from our past.”
                                                                                                  – Maria Inocencio 2011