# Fragment (painting)

Fragment is an oil and crayon on canvas painting by Nancy Graves. Classified as a work of postmodernism, abstract expressionism, and aerial landscape, the painting hangs in the Memorial Art Gallery, New York. Graves was inspired by her observations of satellite imagery, which she employed to show an aerial landscape perspective through a lens of abstraction and in doing so challenge ways of seeing.

## Formal analysis

The eye is immediately drawn towards the upper right corner of the painting (Zone One) where an abstracted, semi-rounded, vibrant orange shape occupies most of that region. From there, the eye follows a dark form in which swirls of white paint tornado down along the left edge of the canvas, into the lower register. In this space, splashes of pink paint are overlaid with nonlinear strings of yellow, blue, and red. As the viewer follows these subtle yet notably bright shapes around and along the bottom left corner on the canvas, one becomes engaged in a visual collision of freckled splotches of green and red dots which fall upon another abstracted, rounded yellow shape that bears a slight similarity to a Rody Horse.
Tension builds in the center of the piece. Three jagged red shapes, like claw marks, disrupt a symphony of pink and black squiggles at the edge of Zone One. Patches of yellow trickle down the center line of the piece, forking apart from another at the rightmost edge of the painting’s upper left corner (Zone Two). In this region, the aforementioned abstracted yellow shapes become in conversation with linear clumps of green paint, along with a melody of pastel tones that assume various statures – distinct in their angularity, texture and volume. Some are thin and light in color, practically weightless, whereas others are deeper in tone and thereby more prominent. Fragmented strokes of blue paint characterize the upper register (made up of Zone One and Zone Two). Across the top, two blue streaks, like elongated semi-circles, interact with every trace of color and definable shape within that region of the painting. Along the left side of the canvas, a couple inches inward from the right most edge, similar blue streaks fall like a broken waterfall into the lower right corner (Zone Four).
The absence of true negative space in the piece adds an additional dimension of character to the piece. From a distance, there appears to be raw, untouched regions in which paint and crayon were never added. However, upon closer inspection, this is not the case and in fact an illusion. In these regions – namely the upper and central area of the bottom left corner (Zone Three) – Graves applied colors comparable to human skin and organic Earth tones.

## Allusion to the natural world and natural sciences

Nancy Graves was born into the America of 1939 – marked by a mix of resilience and anxiety, as many families were still recovering from the economic devastation of the Great Depression, while cultural optimism blossomed in the arts, entertainment, and the early stirrings of war preparedness, with stark contrasts between rural and urban life, as well as growing racial and class divisions. She was raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a rural small town located squarely in the mountainous region of the Berkshires. There, she paid regular visits to the Berkshire Museum – where her father worked and which is celebrated for the manner in which the space “combined natural science and cultural artifacts with both early and contemporary art”. Graves’ early exposure to such conceptual forms lent to an affinity for the natural world and questioning ways of seeing. This affinity is evident throughout Graves’ creative portfolio in her choice of materials, subject matter, and alignment with the stylistic artistic movements of postmodernism (which demands the recognition that our conscious and subconscious thought processes can fail us as a result of limited perspective and outdated belief systems) and abstract expressionism (which focuses on subconscious creation inspired by raw emotion and subjective experience, and is characterized by bold strokes and gestures). She often chose to work with what art critics of her time described as “unorthodox materials”. This included but was not limited to burlap, nonhuman animal bones, and found objects (such as crayon, as seen in Fragment), thus appealing to the American public’s captivation with the socially-ascribed taboo.
In the late 1950s, amidst the geopolitical conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, formally known as the Cold War, fascination with the aerial view grew to an all time high in American popular culture due, in part, to the emergence of space exploration and, coincidently, satellite imagery. In August 1959, the U.S. satellite Explorer VI captured the first ever satellite image of Earth: a black and white image, with a blur of stark white that narrowly angles from the upper right corner down to the center-left, falls into a defined semi-spherical shape. What the satellite captured was beams of light reflecting across Earth’s surface. However, without a proper title or description, the content of the photograph is difficult, if not impossible, to discern, thus creating an explicit abstraction of a true natural form. The American public was captivated, including Nancy Graves. Since Fragment is an abstract expressionist interpretation of an unspecified satellite image taken from outer space, the painting has strong ties to American space exploration.
If Fragment is positioned in a state of contrast with a real satellite image, the similarities in texture and reflection of organic, physical forms are evident.

## Postmodernism era: Aerial landscape art

One of the many subject matters postmodernist artists, including Nancy Graves, were playing with predominately throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and exploring as a means to challenge peoples’ sense of reality was Aerial Landscape (as evident in the painting's classification as an abstracted aerial view of a non-urban landscape scene). As a respective field in modes of artistic classification, aerial landscape originally came to be through mapmaking but developed over the course of the twentieth century through the introduction of air travel and aerial photography. Such perspective, which the average person alive in the first half of the twentieth century was unlikely to see through their own eyes, enabled “a broader change in consciousness,” that is according to Russian suprematist, avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Aerial landscapes either explicitly showcase or aim to evoke the appearance of a landscape scene. The “evocative” notion is the approach Graves took in her abstract expressionist interpretations of aerial landscape imagery, as evident in Fragment. In that vein, there is “a natural kinship between aerial landscape painting and abstract painting, not only because familiar objects are sometimes difficult to recognize when viewed aerially, but because there is no natural 'up' or 'down' orientation in the painting.”

## Second-wave feminism and satellite imagery

By the end of the 1960s, when Nancy Graves' art career was taking-off, second-wave feminism was becoming organized as a cohesive social-cultural and political movement. As a whole, this movement is characterized by and historically remembered for its persistent fight for gender equality, reproductive rights, and sexual autonomy, as well as for the criticisms of and challenges posed towards traditional gender roles in Western societies. Interestingly, some feminist scholars and activists (Nancy Graves, among them) of the time employed satellite imagery as a mode to create productive discourse around the question: “What might [the global view] mean in an unequal world?” Thus satellite imagery took on another layer of intrigue in its ability to represent the unseen and thus challenge ways of seeing. Geographer and social theorist Barney Warfe asserted that people should “view [satellites], and the images they produce, as more than simply technological phenomena, but as systems of knowledge irretrievably intertwined within changing relations of power, culture, and space.” Thus a strong relationship between satellite imagery and then-popular progressive lines of thinking related to gender equity and challenging marginalizing hierarchical structures becomes apparent. "For those who see themselves as not having had their voice(s) heard in history, the postmodern paradigm makes a theoretical case for inserting heretofore unarticulated voices of women in new scripts, new texts, and new discourses. It is a way of dethroning the old epistemology and those who held power through it." Yet again, an assumption has to be made that Nancy Graves was among those inspired by such discourse given that her sources of inspiration and own ways of thinking existed at the ideological crossroads of postmodernist thinking, feminist theory, and interest in the natural sciences, and that Fragment is an interpretation of a satellite image.