"But shadows themselves are pictures/In which there live,
darting from my eyes by the thousand,/Vanished entities with
familiar faces."
—Baudelaire, “Obsession”
Much of our ability to see ordinary material objects depends crucially on our ability to see their shadows—both those that they cast, and those that are cast upon them. But what, if anything, are shadows? Are they presences or absences? Do they have colors, or are they only variations of black and gray? In Light of Shade, on view at Fergus McCaffrey’s New York gallery from February 27 to April 19, 2019, brings together a group of seven women who mine and explore the areas of indeterminacy between representation and abstraction, vision and blindness, light and shade. Together, the works on view provide moments of fleeting relief from the pressure to represent the world as it is, instead delving into mundane phenomena that might otherwise escape our attention: desaturated shadows on a wall, sunspots that appear on the floor in mid-afternoon, flecks of dust in a ray of summer light. So, too, do these images embrace moments of non-knowing, obscured areas of darkness in which representational space disappears and the imagination takes over.
In Anna Conway’s elegantly composed and rigorously quiet representational paintings, the artist deploys stark contrasts in light and shadow to depict ominous, foreboding modernist spaces. In Steady As She Goes (2018), an eerie darkness coats the still interior of a study-like setting: the ambiguous shadow gives way to voids of darkness, and a non-knowing of dusk or dawn. Conway uses shadow to create a dystopic sense of foreboding and uncertainty. Kathleen Jacobs’s approach is similarly meditative and procedural: Jacobs works outdoors, using tree bark as the surface on which to begin her lines and marks. Allowing a natural patina (for as long as two years) to weather and mature before moving the aged paintings back into her studio to paint and rework— the resulting DODDL (2017) is complexly textured and abstract, presenting a vertical portal into an infinite nocturnal landscape, simultaneously suggesting darker themes while channeling the possibilities for dreams and adventure.
Meredyth Sparks mines the mundane to find small moments in which perception becomes impossible. In this way, the artist reveals the line between figuration and abstraction as being a zone of shadowy indeterminacy rather than a hard-and-fast line. In her photo-and-fabric collage Mauve Grid/Dresser Redux (from the 2011 series Extractions), Sparks uses contrasting bolts of patterned fabric to create broad upper and lower zones that read as the juncture between carpeted floors and papered wall with a photograph of an Ikea-like bedroom dresser and mirrored vanity furnishing the domestic interior. In the mirror’s reflective surface, Sparks inserts an ominously indeterminate dark space, undoing the ordered and geometric space of the canvas with darkness’s indeterminate formlessness and depth. Rachelle Dang also reflects on the domestic and psychological through both a contemporary and historical lens. Her all-white sculpture, Seedling Carrier Both Tomb and Womb, encompassed by a profusion of flowers and vines evokes a miniature house, sarcophagus, birdcage, or crib. It lays atop a stack of shipping pallets with oversized seedpods strewn underneath. Based on an 18th century scientific drawing for a botanical shipping carrier, the form also alludes to conflicting notions of transformation and confinement, new and old, loss and wonder.
In his Theory of Colors, Goethe notably drew attention to the subtle chromatic variations present in shadows, arguing that all hues are colored shadows. In her Shade Paintings, Marcia Hafif extends the philosopher’s provocation in her own systematic exploration of the possibilities of pigment and process. By adding subtle amounts of black to an initial pigment, the artist produced a series of canvases in progressing shades of color that are surprisingly intense and vivid. This precise and structured approach allowed Hafif to question the practice of painting itself, investigating the structures and assumptions undergirding the medium.For more than five decades, Martha Jungwirth has single-mindedly pursued an abstract practice immune to art world trends; approaching painting as a project that is far from finished—matching light, deft, and intelligent application of color and line with shadowy and excessive moments of raw indeterminacy. Jungwirth’s paintings are consistently phenomenological, and the painter uses a literally impressionistic approach to translate sensorial experience onto canvas without labored justifications of spiritual import or art historical lineage; in this way, her explorations of light and shadow stem not from thought, but from vision itself. Sally Ross is likewise committed to abstraction: after making a decisive break from representational painting in 2012, Ross has since been creating a series of expansive topographical canvases which are cut, sewn, and punctured, to evoke landscapes as seen from above. The work progresses from highlight to darkness, as if the viewer were observing a cloud covering a field from above. This operation is central to Ross’s approach: abstraction is relentlessly temporalized, reminding viewers that, because of the slow progression of the sun and its attendant visual forms of light and shade, the visual realm is ever-changing, despite our efforts to create order.
