Carmen Neely: a trace beyond the life of the body

The works presented in Carmen Neely’s a trace beyond the life of the body arise from what the artist describes as an unanswerable question: how to uphold memory while also upholding truth. Vibrant traces and calligraphic lines negotiate continuously with negative space through gestures that remain intuitive. The traces of erasure do not simply leave voids; they register blocked information, subtle disruptions that insist on being seen. Through acts of addition and subtraction, Neely emphasizes the necessity of negative space, not as absence, but as a marker of what is missing. 

Alongside the canvases, the exhibition includes a series of drawings on paper, where similar tensions are explored on a more intimate scale. Here, intensity and confusion are distilled into a quieter register, allowing the viewer to encounter the instability of language and memory in closer proximity. 

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"Speech leaves no mark in space; like gesture it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus, while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. Our terror of the unmarked grave is the terror of insignificance of a world without writing. The metaphor of the unmarked grave is one which joins the mute and the ambivalent; without the mark there is no boundary, no point at which to begin the repetition. Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature: the lovers' names carved in bark, the slogans on the bridge, and the strangely uniform and idiosyncratic hand that has tattooed the subways. Writing serves to capture the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize. If writing is an imitation of speech, it is also a “script,” as a marking of speech in space which can be taken up through time in varying contexts.  The space between letters, the space between words, bears no hesitations of the body; it has only the hesitations of knowing, the hesitations which arise from its place outside history - transcendent yet lacking the substantiating power of context "  

Susan Stewart, On Longing. Duke University Press, 1993. p. 31