Mary Lum's remains of the day

During her 2004-05 residency at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the subjects of Mary Lum's gaze were Boston, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. Lum, like a contemporary flaneuse, wandered around cities, photographed skylines, a window, maybe even a lost shoe, and collected the images as found objects, remnants of human experience. In her Radcliffe exhibition Tracing the City, Lum installed 400 photographs, each measuring about 35 mm wide, in a single horizontal strip exactly five feet, two inches above the ground. (Lum herself is five, two,) Putting us in her shoes, as it were, Lum not only brought us into her world of spaces that teeter between the abstract and representational, but also situated us as voyeurs of her conceptual process as well as the spaces she photographs. At the same time the strip drew us into a narrative that really had neither beginning nor end.

Tracing the City is indicative of Lum's larger visual practice, one that trades in the remnant, the fragment, and the border between fact and fiction. In her cut drawings, Lum works with used comic books and other printed matter to create delicate architectural spaces that draw us in yet leave us groundless. Such work posits the space not as a physical object or quality, but rather as metaphor of a psychological, emotional state. Lum's spaces, whether photographic or drawn, are laden with memory, laced with the residue of human experience.

Like her Radcliffe exhibition, 64 Scenes offers abstracted spaces, spaces shrouded in memory, heavy with experience. As in the earlier project, we are voyeurs, trying to construct a narrative from the images, which this time run vertically, like a strip of 35mm film. Different here, however, are the sources for the images, which are remnants of newspaper photographs, and the captions Lum provides. Lum's captions fuse space with the temporal, taking us into the future, the past, and the present. This move pushes Lum's narrative structure further into the realm of nonlinearity and further abstracts spaces already abstracted, suggesting the instability not only of space and time, but also of memory and history. For me, this work is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's "Berlin Chronicle," an essay in which the author moves to and fro between childhood and adulthood, between Berlin and Paris. What the two share is a propensity for the nonlinear and an inclination to regard the psychological in spatial terms.

64 Scenes presents points of projection onto which we may transfer our own histories, our own experiences, and our own memories. In that sense, 64 Scenes includes us but also distances us. Its juxtapositions jog our own sense of time and space, rendering them not as discrete nuggets of personal or even collective experience, but rather as elements of an elaborate performance, a theater in which we both watch and participate.

Steven Nelson, assistant professor of African and African American art history at UCLA and former Art Journal reviews editor, was Mary Lum's fellow fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2004-05. His book The Mousgoum Teleuk, Tectonics, Travel, and Time is under contract at the University of Chicago Press.

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