Joy Ray ’89

I grew up in a religious home, a preacher’s kid. My trust in organized religion has long since turned to skepticism, but questions of belief still fascinate me. What is the meaning of life? What if we never know for sure? What if everything we think we know is wrong? For me, there is no more potent proof of what lies beyond human understanding than Nature. Deeply complex, brimming with mystery and power, its scope far exceeds the limits of our imaginations. We construct elaborate taxonomies to categorize every bird or reptile we find, but we still don’t know why they exist or how they came to be. Inspired by this enigma, I create highly textured and layered paintings and sculptures resembling natural formations of stone and earth. I juxtapose these with marks indicating manmade systems of illusory and failing control. Symbols and glyphs reference divination, the act of seeking messages from the gods. I work primarily in shades of black and white, a diagrammatic, allegorical absence of color also used in Nōh theater, Commedia dell’arte, and black-and-white films created in the era of color. This transforms “color” into a signal, a contrast, a morality tale. At its core, my work explores the desire to understand our place in the cosmos, which I see as tragicomic in its futility. How absurd to think that we can know anything about the eternal. But: how poetic, how human, to try.