Category: reviews

by Emese Krunak-Hajagos

The entire Aga Khan Museum was designed around light, so as its 10th anniversary approached the curators decided to celebrate it with an exhibition entirely about light.

Light is central to the museum and visitors experience it right away upon entering the building. In the hallway, To Breathe, Korean artist Kimsooja’s site-specific installation takes us to a different dimension, a dimension of magical light. The windows are covered with diffraction grating film and as daylight passes through it reveals rainbows throughout the space. The magic of this work is in making the invisible visible. Coloured light always amazes and fills us with joy. This kind of play with light can be found on many levels of the museum, shining through windows and creating its own ‘artworks’ on walls and floors.

There is nothing better than light as the focus for the anniversary exhibition. There are so many kinds: the light of the sun, the moon and the light inside us, the light we absorb and the light we radiate. The exhibition titled, Light: Visionary Perspectives, is an amazing combination of scientific and spiritual approaches, involving both historical and contemporary visions.

Tannis Nielsen’s, mazinibii’igan / a creation (2020) is the first piece I see. The Anishinaabemowin word ‘mazinibii’igan’ means “a drawing, a sketch, or a design.” It is a continuous video installation with many possible beginnings and endings. The installation is a result of Tannis Nielsen’s research into electromagnetic energies. She discovered that residual radiation stems from the Big Bang, believed to be the origin of the universe.
Stepping into the installation I am enveloped by darkness. It must be the beginning of the universe when nothing existed. Then some weak light grows, and I hang on to it with hope, as any little light is better than total darkness. Suddenly bright lights with impressive soundtracks surround me and it is almost too much, but I lose myself in this otherworldly installation and stop thinking. It surrounds me. As the story told by Elder Marie Gaudet (Turtle Clan Anishinaabe from Wikwemikong), a knowledge keeper and practitioner of healing songs and ceremonies, the installation invites us to reimagine creation. So, it seems I am inside the process of the creation that started, as the narrative says, with a single light emerging from the darkness. Am I swallowed by this installation? I feel I’m in the middle of it, totally absorbed by the darkening and lightening universe. It is a very complex world where dark, light, sound, narrative and music work together perfectly as I become part of the creation. It feels so good, uplifting and I am happy and amazed. Will I ever be able to leave it or do I want to stay inside and see what comes next? It is pulsating with energy, and I feel absorbed in it, an almost physical sensation. It is also very spiritual and mesmerizing. It was hard to distance myself from this installation and I needed some time to re-enter reality.

What I saw next, I can barely call ‘reality’ as Anish Kapoor’s two mirrors, facing each other from opposite walls, playing a game with me, challenging my perception. It is about what we see or what we think we see. Long ago Muslim philosophers thought that the light came out from our eyes. In the main floor exhibition room, the book Opticae Thesaurus addresses this idea. The title of the book is a Latin translation of Kitab Al-Manazir (Book of Optics) by 10th-century Muslim scholar and mathematician Ibn al-Haytham. He revolutionized the field by arguing that sight is made possible by light traveling to the eye, rather than by light emanating from it. His discovery influenced the western world as well and led to the development of the camera obscura and, ultimately, the modern camera.

Kapoor’s two mirrored disks, one made of steel and the other of wood and lacquer, remind me of our eyes. From their concave surface they show a view we don’t expect, seeing ourselves and the space in a different way. It is very complex. First, from a distance you see yourself upside down, then, as you get a closer look, you are standing on the ground again. The mirror is creating its own reality. Mirrors in art often denote self-reflection, so what’s happening here? Which one of the images is real or is all just visual illusion? As Bita Pourvash, Associate Curator, Aga Khan Museum says, “we also must understand that we don’t only see with our eyes but with our mind and heart and how they are connected in creating an image.”

I visited the exhibition a day before it opened, and the light was somewhat erratic, some areas a little darker. Stepping out of the view of the mirrors and looking back as they were reflecting on each other I wondered if, somehow, they communicate with each other in the dark when no one is around, sharing their experiences of us and how their tricks confused us.

The title A Thousand Silent Moments (Rain Forest) reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, that also takes place in a rain forest. It is a magical story like Anila Quayyum Agha’s. Inspired by objects and paintings in the museum collections, American-Pakistani artist, Anila Quayyum Agha, created a lacquered steel and LED installation. On the walls and on the floor, we see a series of laser cut patterns of flowers, leaves and animals from various cultures and historical periods projected from the glass box in the middle of the room. A bright green light surrounds me. At first, I thought, how peaceful. Indeed, it is beautiful; it is paradise or the garden of Eden — harmony is created. Then I recognize that my shadow becomes part of the installation, appearing on the floor and on the walls. The installation is built on contrasting elements: light and shadow. They play, they change as the movement continues. It reminds me of lying under a large tree on a summer day, looking at the light coming through the leaves. It is, like this installation, wonderful and peaceful; I could enjoy it all day long. However, we all know that where there is light, there is shadow, as shadow can’t exist without light. As I walk further into the room and look in every possible direction, I become even more aware of my shadow becoming an interactive part of this installation. There is a very intense movement of images and light, everything is changing. The harmony I felt at first, suddenly breaks. I feel the opposing forces, light and shadow, including my own, as though they are in a dialog. As Quayyum Agha says about her work, “light and pattern are intentionally utilized to create ‘perceptually soothing and conceptually challenging environments.”

The tower-like installation, The Matriarch: Unraveled Threads, by Montreal-based Cameroonian-Belgian artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka contains more than 300 panels. The artist decided to create it when her grandmother passed away and she unexpectedly became the matriarch of her family.

The lighthouse is built from various materials and uses many mediums, like analog photography, screen printing, photo transfer, embroidery on dyed cotton and linen with red earth pigments, acrylic, paper, and steel. The fabric came from her family’s workshop in Cameroon and was dyed there with the earth. The photographs come from different sources, combining self-portraits with images from ancestral archives as well as contemporary portraits. The stories created by them are hypothetical, and do not follow any linear timeline. Together they create a circle, much like a tribal circle, where the main idea is to be together, belonging to the tribe and its history. The artist addresses the idea of how family continues to live in you and in generations to come. Not just your genes but your memories and cultural inheritance include more of the past, present and future than your individual time allows you to experience. The responsibility is to remember, share and pass down your cultural and historical inheritance. As the lighthouse guides people safely to shore, your guidance can influence coming generations to remember who they are and to make the right choices. It also reminds me of the symbol of a single candle shining in the dark. While there may be other lit candles as well, they can’t take away the light from yours. The images are illuminated from inside the lighthouse. Light, besides being a physical element in this artwork, also becomes a metaphor for enlightenment of the heart and mind.

Phillip K. Smith III’s Two Corners is a 3D work of colour-choreographed large reflective panels placed in two opposing corners of the room. It is a very intensive experience as I become a part of it when stepping into its universal space, surrounded by its ever-changing colours and interplaying light. Infinity is the right word to describe this installation. When I turned from one wall to another it seemed to open, giving me the feeling that I could walk further without any limit. The desert-like landscape horizon is confusing. I think it made me understand what a mirage really is. The changing of colors further deepens this impression. There is a blue sky filling the room for a short time, then the redness of a sunset or the greenness of fields. Sometimes the colors appear at the same time overlapping and framing each other. This shiny orgy of colors is bigger than my ‘perception’ and addresses the unconscientious layers of my brain. They instill different moods and feelings, turning my attention to these underrated territories of our minds.

As Marianne Fenton, Special Projects Curator, Aga Khan Museum summarized, “The installations and objects in the exhibition explore our shared humanity, encouraging us to experience light through the perspectives of these artists who have captured its emotional, spiritual, and physical presentations.” The exhibition, Light: Visionary Perspectives focuses on the power of light over darkness. Exploring both historical and contemporary understanding and creative interpretations of light. It shows us the possibility of new, hopeful horizons.

Images are courtesy of Aga Khan Museum.

*Exhibition information: Light: Visionary Perspectives, till April 21, 2025, Aga Khan Museum, 77 Wynford Drive, Toronto. Museum hours: Tue & Thu – Sun 10:30 am – 5:30 pm, Wed 10 am – 8 pm.

by John Mendelsohn

Jen Mazza: Vicissitudes of Nature
January 10-February 22, 2025
Ulterior Gallery, New York
www.ulteriorgallery.com

Christopher Hart Chambers: Passages
January 23-March 11, 2025
Crossing Art, New York
www.crossingart.com

Louisa Waber: The World Inside This One
January 21- March 7, 2025
TenBerke Architects
events@tenberke.com

In her exhibition, Jen Mazza has assembled a kind of rebus made of quotations, both visual and literary. “Rebus” implies that from the images and words – variously painted, written, and sculpted – something will be spelled out. Maybe the desire to make sense is the red herring in this mystery, but nonetheless clues abound.

The original sources for the works are all from the past, starting in the Renaissance, on up to the early 20th century. This range of time periods lends an archival, antiquarian air to the exhibition. But rather than creating a cabinet of curiosities, Mazza’s poetic conceptualism works like poetry itself, placing one image adjacent to the next, and allowing their energetic conjunction to conjure something new in our consciousness.

In a 2021 interview, Mazza said that, “After all, anytime that we engage an historical work, we are engaging with the past as if it pertains to us.” So, we as viewers must be alert to how these couriers from an earlier time might actually be speaking to us about our relationship to the natural world, history, and most importantly to change as an existential constant.

The exhibition’s title, Vicissitudes of Nature, points to life’s unpredictable contingencies. This sense is embodied in the artist’s rendering of Ruskin’s diary script, his words describing the weather, including “Terrific Thunder”, “brighter”, “beauty”, and “Worse and worse”.

Water and its evocative possibilities are a recurring presence throughout the exhibition – in an expanse of sea, in diagrams of nautical navigation, in the name of a ship, and in passages from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves.

This feeling of watery, shifting fortunes is embodied in the exhibition’s largest work, Portent 1, a painted excerpt of Titian’s The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, a 12-block woodcut. In Mazza’s version the Israelites and the Egyptians have both been effaced, with only the rippling waves remaining visible.

The sailing ship HMS Terpsichore delivered from Southern Africa the first zebra publicly displayed in Great Britain, the sole survivor of a pair that had been transported. In Terpsichore (1760) Mazza faithfully reproduces George Stubbs’s painting of the animal, while in Terpsichore (1847), the painting’s subject is a white silhouette – both are reminders of the empire’s colonial exploitation.

Christopher Hart Chambers paints paradise in the form of flowers, leaves, and branches, densely layered in atmospheric space. He evokes a world in bold motifs, distillations of growing things blooming and intertwining.

This world of organic energy is both observed from real life, and echoes how in many cultures nature becomes art, bringing the life of plants into human discourse as a charged spiritual, aesthetic, or decorative presence. In Chambers’s work we sense as a model flowers and branches depicted in the art of China and Japan. Equally apparent is the lineage of modern painting, ranging from Matisse to Alex Katz, that seeks to create simplified abstractions of nature’s complexity. In Chambers’s hands, the patterns of nature take on logo-like silhouettes, perhaps a distant recollection of this painter’s early days in the Street Art movement in New York.

One striking work is Fertile Circus, a fugue of overlapping rhythms, formed by glowing depths of yellow light, that alternate with vertical passages of olive green and aqua. Overlaying this background are black tree trunks sprouting semi-transparent scarlet flowers. Wafting in front of the trees are wavering bands of turquoise and lavender. Closest to us are vertical sine curves in a soft green, and a large central stem with leaves that seems to create a negative space for us to enter.

In the painting Chocolate Forest, black, spear-like leaves ominously dominate the soft-focus space beyond, over which play a sign of hope – twisting stems and small, red flowers.

The artist’s touch is ever-present in these works, in the delicate mists of colored space, and in the impasto, scumbling, and glazes of oil paint. These painterly techniques work in contrast to the flat, solidly colored trees and tendrils.

Color is the prime vehicle for feeling in these works. It exists on a spectrum from jewel-like tones, to color tamed with the admixture of white, to black that serves as a stark counterpoint.

Taken together, the elements of Chambers’s paintings coalesce into an enchanted vision, a psychedelic realm that encompasses dualities – the nuanced and the graphic, the buoyant and the haunted.

The World Inside This One, written across one of Louisa Waber’s pieces from 2023, serves as the title of this exhibition. These words might be guide to entering into the many small works on paper and the paintings shown here. Through drawing, watercolor, and acrylic, Waber evokes a psychic realm to which the visual is an opened portal.

This portal takes many forms, but certain commonalities emerge. A small sheet of paper’s surface flooded with a wash of color, as a spidery structure floats across it. A bold form emerging from a dark atmosphere, along with a tracery of lines. A quilt-like grid holding a grid of color and emptiness. Vivid brushstrokes supporting a bramble of angled lines.

These are just a few of the recurring motifs, but together they constitute an ongoing, seemingly diaristic series of documents that record states of feeling. Like visual seismographs, they are sensitive to the fluctuations of mediums under the artist’s touch. They variously convey a sense anguish, searching, release, and fierce energy, along with a desire to construct a matrix to hold all the emotions that have been awakened. It seems that above all there is an insistence on the artist’s voice to speak, whether emphatically or quietly, without censorship.

A prime example is the painting How Do You Know? from 2024, with its spare, cobalt blue brushstroke that curves back on itself, like the vestige of a whirlwind. On top of it are drawn blood-red lines, a jury-rigged, high-wire act above the maelstrom.

This work is part of a heritage that has many strands. There is the history of Expressionism, in its many forms, with its faith in painterly physicality. The example of Paul Klee is a recurring one, with his intimate evocations of the dream-world that is just beyond the everyday. And there are other precedents, like Louise Fishman, who especially in her early work combined outspoken feminism and abstraction.

In the end, what makes these paintings and drawings original is how this particular artist grants us access, through a kind of direct transmission, to the drenched landscape of her inner world.

by Matthew Garrison

Bronx based artist Nicky Enright, born in Ecuador, disrupts and collapses events and observations at Albright College’s Freedman Gallery in two monumental drawing series, FLAGments and FRACKments. In these works, images extracted from Enright’s own photographs and past projects are distilled into immense black and white compositions. In tandem with the drawings, Enright’s video, I’M MIGRATION, presents manipulated closed-circuit and aerial footage of individuals traversing parched landscapes behind boldfaced captions. Together, the work imparts an urgent need to address our international climate crisis as global citizens in a world where diminishing resources and violent weather events are driving people from their homes in search of safety and a living wage.

The largest of Enright’s drawings from the FRACKments series, FRACKments 01: Scape(5 ½ x 20 feet) consists of a cumulation of multiple sheets of paper arranged side-by-side on the wall. Urgency is evident in the rapid application of ink and wax pencil. The materials preclude erasure. Consequently, improvised images and bold passages of light and dark emerge from its execution. Enright’s early days as a graffiti artist seem to inform the energy and necessity of Scape’s realization. The drawing is a dense description of catastrophe, mutation and layered associations. Its constellation of colliding themes forecasts a perilous future. An enormous cracked skull on the left side of the drawing is counterbalanced on the right by an even larger portrait of an unwitting pigeon or parrot. The pigeon/parrot’s massive size might be the result of an extreme close-up or, perhaps, giant birds inhabit Enright’s unruly world. As the pigeon/parrot gazes outward from the drawing, two young figures are intent on a receipt, as if analyzing a list of challenges encountered in the chaotic world they’ve inherited. Elsewhere in the composition, scuba divers float above a bleak topography containing a small flag and large industrial crane. The arm of the crane intersects a billowing smokestack attached to the back of a turtle. Scape shows the planet on a precipice, where extreme evolution is necessary if habitats and species are to survive.

Enright’s drawings belong to a lineage of large-scale work that layers imagery and highlights significant world events. The most recognized is Picasso’s black and white response to the 1937 Nazi bombing of the small Basque town, Guernica. Picasso’s grayscale palette is often compared to newsprint, the prevalent mass media of his time, but the painting’s exclusion of color also distills the shear horror of the attack. Hovering over Guernica’s destruction is a jagged lightbulb, emblematic of the detached technology that separates violent actions from tragic consequences. Similarly located in Enright’s drawing, Scape, is a tree on its side, cleanly sliced through with a saw, its interior rings floating above a tempestuous world, indexing the passage of time and loss.

Life and resources are precious in FLAGments and FRACKments. For instance, in Enright’s piece, FRACKments 07: Trash, the remnants of life are commemorated with white lines against a dark void, while the drawing, FRACKments 02: Cementerio Mundial, simultaneously evokes a “world cemetery” and the funeral of his uncle, Tío Miguel, who died in Ecuador in March 2024. Time itself is expansive in the work, reaching far beyond the present, encompassing past and future generations. Children are interspersed throughout the two series. Enright’s young son, currently living in Switzerland, peers out of the drawing, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, and plays a game of life-size chess in FLAGments 06: Stars. In Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 03: Customs (5 ½ x 10 feet), his son holds a blank sign. Text appears throughout many of the drawings as handwritten correspondence, brand names and graffiti, although it is occasionally absent in areas where words are expected. In addition to the empty sign, Stumbling Stones are incorporated into Customs. Enright encountered these small brass stones during a residency in Berlin. Stumbling Stones (Stolpersteine in German) is a vast memorial conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in 1992. Each stone, inscribed with the name of a Holocaust victim, is laid in front of the victim’s last known private residence throughout Europe and Russia. The absence of names on the stones in Enright’s work allows for personal reflection.

Enright’s art also aligns with artists whose work investigates the movement of people. For example, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden addressed The Great Migration in paintings and collage. And, Mexican muralist, José Clemente Orozco, recounted the migration of indigenous American civilization thousands of years ago in the 1934 fresco, Migration, a part of his immersive mural, The Epic of American Civilization. However, Enright acknowledges modern modes of transportation and surveillance in his exploration of borders and migration. His video, I’M MIGRATION, consists largely of drone footage, while airplanes and vehicles are incorporated into his drawings. Consequently, border crossings come to encompass, not only checkpoints, but also the broader implications of flying, airport customs and transportation security. Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 05: Gazebo, deconstructs air travel and flags through vertical and horizontal bands that read as an amalgamation of national symbols. The drawing includes both interior and exterior views of an airplane. A capsule shaped porthole in the upper right corner looks out onto the aircraft’s wing through what might be seen as household blinds. A plane soars off the left edge of the drawing. This could be a rendering of the same plane observed simultaneously from interior and exterior perspectives or, perhaps, it is a representation of the arrival and departure of respective aircraft. A gazebo dominates the center of the drawing, described by Enright as a meeting place. Yet, the gazebo is empty, allowing for personal projections of community within its structure, or inferring an evacuation. Hovering above the gazebo is a bird’s-eye view of a young figure encircled within a void, silently observing the ebb and flow of events.

Enright’s installation of FLAGments and FRACKments in conjunction with I’M MIGRATION directly connects migration to nationalism and global warming. Also contributing to border tensions are populations seeking a living wage. In Enright’s piece, FLAGments 08: Zero, a hand holds a bill adjusted to show its value in U.S. dollars (.000024). He explains that the design for Zero was based on the least valuable currency in the world at the time of its realization, the Iranian Rial. In response to this severe economic discrepancy, Enright advocates for a global minimum wage and has designed The Globo, a universal currency that incorporates legal tender from more than twenty-five countries. He also questions the very concept of borders established through dominance and warfare, which often contradict nature’s own configuration of rivers, coasts, and mountain ranges. Once again, Enright’s stance recalls Orozco’s mural, The Epic of American Civilization. In Orozco’s panel, Modern Migration of the Spirit, a heap of religious artifacts lay at the base of a mountain comprised of heavy artillery. Here, spirituality is distorted to align with the values that justify brutality and barbarism in the shaping of civilizations. Christ himself, the Prince of Peace, is presented as an ax wielding warrior with his fist raised. A natural landscape has been recreated in the image of its conquerors.

Enright’s expansive conception of time across generations necessitates a drastic and immediate response to the realities of climate change. Economies reliant on extracting value from precious resources and populations must recalibrate to emphasize restoration and repair and, in the process, acknowledge that migration is inevitable and beneficial to a healthy society. In Enright’s drawing, FLAGments 01: Welcome Back, people are held captive behind a fence. They are looking in different directions, and some appear to be lost in reflection. Their detachment from one another implies sustained conditions that are unchanging, as though condemned to a perpetual state of waiting. The irony of the drawing’s title inscribed on the fence calls into question their location. Have they returned home, or are they confined elsewhere? Will they be released or forcibly transferred? The humanity of the detainees is in stark contrast to their captivity. These conditions, so frequently viewed in the media, are often met with indifference, apathy and jingoist threats. An uncertain future permeates Enright’s work. FLAGments and FRACKments encompasses a planet on the brink of ruin with inhabitants who must uproot to survive a fragmented world of borders, ideologies and governments that would prioritize nationalism over humanity.

Artist, László Moholy-Nagy, observed in his seminal text, Vision in Motion, “From the time of the first flags and emblems, creating the romance of heraldry, the customs of religion, peoples and nations have been given meaning by hues of the spectrum.” The chromatic identifiers described by Moholy-Nagy are referenced in FLAGments and FRACKments through its absence of color. Similar to Enright’s selective employment of text, his drawings in black and white provide space for personal associations, allegiances and tenets. Although individual connections might also arise from self-imposed limitations, change begins with the realization that societal conditions and values shape and constrain our grasp of history and the moment we inhabit. Enright’s recognition and dismantling of these internal barriers pave the way for a vibrant, interconnected world.

Nicky Enright’s FLAGments and FRACKments runs through December 13th, 2024 at the Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania.