In her column for Elephant, Kitty Lees looks at a different archival piece of jewellery every month. For May: Man Ray!
Man Ray is remembered for making the familiar feel strange. He took a domestic iron and studded it a row of fourteen tacks, filled an olive jar with silver ball bearings and wrapped a sewing machine in a blanket and tied with string. His love for object-making came from his love of image-making – Ray considered himself a painter but was also a prolific photographer, producing dreamlike fashion portraits while experimenting with photograms, cameraless images which he renamed ‘rayographs’ after himself. Associated with both Dada and Surrealism, he was less interested in what things were and more in what they could become.
This attraction is felt in his jewellery, too. During the 1960s and 70s, Man Ray collaborated with the Italian jeweller GianCarlo Montebello to produce a series of wearable works based on ideas that had appeared throughout his practice. Eyes, lips, optical tricks and fragments of the body were imagined and arranged in gold and silver, transforming his abstract Surrealist ideas into tangible things.
Optic Topic Mask, conceived in 1974, is one such transformation. It has the same smooth, futuristic feeling as a modern-day plastic beach visor, made instead from gold-plated silver and suspended from a suede cord. Tiny holes puncture the metal, arranged in twisting circles designed for the wearer to look through.
The work began as a pair of gold sunglasses, of which the delicate arms of the glasses eventually broke, prompting Man Ray to rethink the design entirely. What emerged was a mask inspired partly by the aluminium face shields worn by racing drivers in the 1930s. Streamlined and aerodynamic, it nods to modernity and the dreamlike states that appear in many of his pieces.
The mask also recalls Ray’s obsession with the face. Throughout his photographs, faces are cropped, obscured, fragmented and pulled apart and then put back together.
There is a touch of that same mischief in Optic Topic Mask. It sits somewhere between jewellery, disguise and sculpture: a gleaming visor that hides the face whilst drawing attention to it. Like so much of Man Ray’s work, it turns looking into a puzzle.
