A Través

Collectively and individually, we pass through thresholds, periods of transitions, and states of indeterminacy in life. In the middle stage between birth and death, there is a “cloud of unknowing,” the Romantic idea of a psychic space with no boundaries; at once freeing and equally anxiety-provoking. If ever there was a time when ambiguity and disorientation are shared sensations, it is now. This exhibition is a meditation on this transitory state. Through performance, sculpture, painting, photography and film, the artists presented offer glimpses into these subconscious states as they play out in figuration.

A Través features work by Simon Evans ™, Ellen Gallagher, Yun-Fei Ji, Jes Fan, Teresa Margolles, Wardell Milan, Jesse Mockrin, Wangechi Mutu, Brandon Ndife, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Kathleen Ryan, Shinichi Sawada, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Bill Viola and Jesse Wine. 

Each work in A Través aims to suggest an ephemeral stage of transition. This exhibition constitutes a meditative collection of subtle gestures in which the work of art operates as a verb rather than a noun, reflecting on a perpetual state of becoming.

In his photographic works, Paul Mpagi Sepuya carefully frames his own body, sometimes alongside companions and collaborators, in the act of taking a photo. Sepuya creates within the space of his studio elliptical moments of psychically-charged physical space that allude to the multivalent definition of the darkroom as, in his words, “both the historical origin of the photographer’s craft as well as the privileged yet marginalized site of queer and colored sexuality and socialization.”

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His projects are based on extensive research and community engagement, tapping into inherited histories and counter-memory. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. Fact and fiction are interwoven in poetic narratives that span time and place.

Yun-Fei Ji employs the stacked perspective and flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to a collective human experience. The work often comments on political realities of both the US and China, expressed in codes by using metaphor and allusion. There is a satirical streak, and his love of the grotesque is balanced with humor and a deep sense of irony.

 Several artists in this exhibition examine the human figure as it moves through and between thresholds and frames. Jesse Mockrin references art historical depictions of divine and saintly bodies, framing and transposing recognizable figures to cast them into a liminal non-space. In her monumental diptych The Magic Chamber (2021), which takes its title from an act of the 1911 musical play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, passages are appropriated from two of Georges de La Tour’s paintings of Saint Sebastian. The androgynous Sebastian on the left panel gazes at another Sebastian being cared for by Saint Irene on the right panel. The painting captures the body traversing its physical boundaries, transforming into a hybrid site of layered meaning.

The body is referenced both directly and indirectly throughout the exhibition. Shinichi Sawada, a self-taught ceramicist based in Japan’s Shiga prefecture, creates hauntingly expressive, meditative spiked and thorned bodies. Since 2000, Sawada has attended Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare organization for individuals with disabilities, where he spends time firing ceramics in a hand-made wooden oven. The objects he creates there hover between chimerical human-animal and spirit-god forms.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit our website  or download the Annotated Checklist.