Art Spiel Picks for January 2025: The Earthly and Celestial in Manhattan

HIGHLIGHTS

Cecilia Vicuña, Lorna Simpson and Nour Mobarak powerfully and eloquently broach heavy subject matter with diligent research in their attempts to preserve significant stories amidst the burdens of colonialism. Each artist speaks to various experiences as they contend with complicated histories of peoples, lands, and the dynamics between them in an array of circumstances. These exhibitions take on the task of engaging with past and present, depicting resourcefulness and perseverance amid the tangled threads of imperialism that wreak havoc across the globe. Viewers are offered context as they enter works that embody life through organic matter, curious objects, and ethereal modalities.

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Deities, spirited forces, and otherworldly occurrences set the tone of each body of work. Through traverse and terrain, attempts to make sense of and record the experiences, narratives, and happenings through language – visually, sonically, and tangibly, are presented upon arrival. Oral histories, reimaginings, and unique encounters emerge. These calcifying thoughts take hold of their environments through formidable and ethereal artworks that defy medium or category. Their abstractness embodies the malleability that serves as a throughline between installation, sound, sculpture, painting, printmaking, text, and video. The visions presented morph around the viewer, lending to the impermeability that serves as an urgent reminder of the subjectivity at hand. Violence is a shadow actor in all three; its presence a catalyst for the enduring tales unraveled and revealed through the course of each body of work, and a poignant examination of humanity itself.

From natural phenomena such as Simpson’s meteor, Mobarak’s mycelia, and Vicuna’s amalgamations of extracting found objects from the earth, they are united in their core foundations of the retelling of memories, loss, and resilience. Each artist masterfully slows down perceptions of time despite the fast-paced energy that exists on the other side of the gallery doors. In this sense, this is perhaps an antidote to the broad-sweeping tactics of homogenization and globalization. The artist is tasked with not only contextualizing the world around them but also inviting us to journey through their experiences, imaginings, and inner musings of what they envision. In revisiting Western empires such as Greece and Rome, we are shown by Vicuña and Mobarak that there can be a reciprocity of how culture is shaped, infused, and embedded. They are taking indigenous stories and superimposing them into these Western spaces and upon international audiences to preserve and protect them from being consumed, while Simpson unpacks American experiences through ephemera that thoughtfully connects past reckoning with current societal issues, both timely and timeless in this expansive alignment.

La Migranta Blue Nipple at Lehmann Maupin @ceciliavicuna @lehmannmaupin

On view through: January 11, 2025

Featuring: Cecilia Vicuña

In La Migranta Blue Nipple, Vicuña revisits the work of Latin American women creating art decades ago as a way to channel the energy of revolt against oppression. In her tireless work to honor the ancestors and lands that she pays homage to, Vicuña’s wonderous amalgamations are born out of extracting found objects from the earth. She turns this detritus discarded by humans into beautiful moments that serve as reminders of our deeds and whispers of existence sandwiched in time. These sculptures are tenderly grafted into two installations on different floors. The upper-level portion of the exhibition reveals two walls aligned with these endearing works that vary in scale and seem to channel energies larger than us. The light spilling in through the street-side window creates a stunning silhouette of the city below; the shadows in dialogue with the works as they commune in silence. A wonderful melding of fibers, twigs, paper, and man-made trinkets is constructed into hybrid forms with intention and deliberation.

The ingenuity behind their rebirths is serendipitous and affirming. Downstairs on the ground floor, more of these works hang suspended from a grid affixed to the ceiling. Wandering through the installation feels so personal, like a pilgrimage home. Beyond that wall, by the entrance, a fleet of deities greet you on entry and exit, serving as guardians and stewards of these magical gifts. On the basement level, some of Vicuna’s videos play, heightening the sensitivity of these objects in relation to her concerns, wishes, and intentions. Guiding us through bodies of water, land, and air, we are removed from the city streets into a realm where possibility is infinite. Through these fluid poetic forms, engagement is heightened, spirituality is amongst us, and stories are brought forth from the earth’s elements in heartfelt alchemy and grace.

Dafne Phono at Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art @adult_nour @themuseumofmodernart

On view through: January 12, 2025

Featuring: Nour Mobarak

Dafne Phono stems from the oldest known opera, dating back to 1598. Mobarak contends with the plight of colonialism through language and sound through operatic machinations. Mobarak recreated this opera by assigning a different language for each character, which was then played at different points in the opera from speakers encased in mycelia. The fungal element is as much conceptually-driven as it is aesthetical: a living organism feeding off of existing matter is an astute translation to broach the subject of colonization. Additionally, this documentation of the Abkhaz, Chatino, and Taa languages speaks to the longevity of these tribes and the beauty that exists within. This process of growing the mycelia in the studio demonstrates the tender balance between patience and urgency to preserve something intangible like language, encased in something living and evolving. The recordings serve as the means of attempted preservation, and these treasured preserves are housed in an extraordinary sculptural installation of mycelia that towers and snakes with a formidable presence.

This spindly, spiraling, statuesque structure channels ideas of root systems, evolution, and extinct species that ruled the planet long before humans began destroying it. The snake in the center of the installation serves as both a guardian and a reference to the Garden of Eden and the errors of humankind. Like historic trade routes, early circumnavigation, and journeys across expansive ecosystems, Dafne Phono is an impressive, irresistible, and humbling experience to behold. Mushrooms serve as cameos in this regal and majestic work. As one moves throughout the room, excerpts of the various languages Mobarak recorded echo throughout the serpentine structure, rumbling from its intestine-like physique and translate onto a screen overlooking MoMA’s sculpture garden.

Looking past the TV in the exhibition that translates the audio being heard, there is a window in the gallery. From this window. trees outside the installation in the courtyard are lit up with lights, which add an additional element of wonder and surreality: the reminder that we live in one existence while experiencing these gifts from another time and place. The balletic and operatic facets of the project provide interesting conceptual lines that serve as reminders of the many eras of an empire that have gone through the regions that Mobarak channels. The cyclical nature of the work serves as an epiphany within a fishbowl: every few minutes, something mind-blowing and unexpected occurs, and as we connect the dots, it happens again.

Earth & Sky at Hauser & Wirth @lornasimpson @hauserwirth

On view through: January 11, 2025

Featuring: Lorna Simpson

Simpson unravels aspects of the American experience and, through it, philosophically excavates the past to connect the dots between the interstellar and humankind. A natural history Smithsonian textbook dating back to 1929 sets the tone and title for this exhibition. Within this text, Simpson discovered an excerpt that focused on a meteorite falling to earth at the feet of a Black sharecropper on a judge’s farm in Mississippi. Though unnamed in the book, Simpson’s own research led her to Mr. Ed Bush. Still warm to the touch, this meteoric experience is further analyzed through the artist’s exploration of the aftermaths of holes entering and exiting surfaces, of land, of space, and of the spirit. To witness this installation of text, painting, print, and movement, we contemplate the parallels between craters in the earth, the body, and the soul. From celestial orbs hurtling toward a planet to bullets hitting a living being, one is left considering the violence, randomness, and chaos that are enmeshed in these instances.

A high contrast palette of black and silver paint depicts massive subjects that dominate the gallery and are so enigmatic that they seemingly meld portraiture, objecthood, and landscape in realms that feel both familiar and unnameable. This obfuscation draws us into a realm that is atmospheric, celestial, and cerebral. The abstraction of these entities is the perfect depiction of the endlessly expansive subject matter. The various orientations of the canvases on view remind the viewer that the subject could be both person and landscape and that it is all intertwined in mystical ways. Regardless of the form we exist in, we all come from and return to the earth through various means, cycles, and conditions. Cataclysms, regardless of whether they’re committed by nature, people, or evolutionary shifts, all result in recesses and abscesses that will continue to be contemplated long after the outfall. Simpson’s humbling and inspiring synthesis reminds us that we, too, are fleeting, organic matter, all part of a stardust tapestry that spans beyond our dreams.

 Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono at MoMA through January 12, 2025

Lorna Simpson: Earth & Sky at Hauser & Wirth through January 11, 2025

Cecilia Vicuña: La Migranta Blue Nipple at Lehmann Maupin through January 11, 2025

All photos courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

About the writer: Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and educator examining history, contemporary culture, materiality, reuse, memory, and space. She has been a visiting and teaching artist at institutions including New Museum; Pratt Institute; Sarah Lawrence College; Residency Unlimited; BRIC; Kean University; Parsons; Columbia University; Children’s Museum of NYC; El Barrio Artspace; Fairleigh Dickinson; and University of Massachusetts. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology (focus in Historical Archaeology) and in Studio Art with honors, with a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from University of Massachusetts; and received an MFA in Fine Arts, with distinction, from Pratt Institute. Exhibitions include Art in Odd Places; the Boiler; Bronx Art Space; Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center; Cornell University; Ed Varie; Elizabeth Foundation; NARS Foundation; Open Source; Pratt Institute; PS122 Gallery; Spring Break Art Show; University of Massachusetts; and Westbeth. Publications include Anthropology of Consciousness; Ante Art; Art Observed; Bust Magazine; Emergency Index; Hyperallergic; Papergirl Brooklyn; Free City Radio; Radio Alhara; Tussle Magazine; the Urban Activist; and Transborder Art. Her work is in public, private, and traveling collections in the U.S. and abroad. @86cherrycherry