Mount Analogue

Vela Projects presents Mount Analogue, the gallery’s first group exhibition, featuring work by Nada Baraka, Cheryl Traub-Adler, Samuel Moscou, and Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee.

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The title is borrowed from Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal. The unfinished novel follows a group of explorer – philosophers who seek to discover Mount Analogue, a mythical mountain, a bridge between heaven and earth.

As much a state of being as a geographical location; the mountain is metaphorically significant and only reveals itself to those who search for it.

"Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique, and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible."

This exhibition groups works that treat nature allegorically, presenting the viewer with images that appear, at first glance, light and ethereal but, upon closer inspection, surprise with details that intrigue and unsettle. The suggestion being that a shift in focus-a reversal of perspective-can invite magical thinking.

Traub-Adler’s Capsized is an obvious example of this phenomenon at work. It appears, at first, purely abstract: a jewel-toned, oil monotype with ample negative space. Looking closer, however, one notices more tangible details: the foaming blue of a churning sea, a sandstone rock face in late afternoon light, forms recognizable as Lion’s Head. What we are looking at is the mountain, upside down – capsized – its mirror image. Here, and in other works, Traub-Adler combines the spiritual (ethereal Madonnas and angels, dreamlike horses and hares) with the physical (scratch marks, sgraffito, scraps, stains, smudges and bleeds), suggesting the bond between earth and sky, visible and invisible by which “man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine reveals itself to man.”

Moscou’s Meadow of the Mountain, with its muddy upper third and unprimed bottom, may be mistaken for an abstract work, rather than a landscape. Still, it is a landscape, but a strange one – a desert, or perhaps a distant planet, where the air is heavy and the soil light. Until one notices the flowers strewn about the bottom half of the picture: playful little orange poppies with aerosol-sprayed green stems. There are other marks, faint circles – perhaps stains from a coffee mug or paint can. The artist has chosen to leave these grimy marks as is, markers of his presence. We can understand and even delight in these disparate parts – but when it comes to making a coherent narrative of the whole, we are left with plenty of room for mystery.

In Wrymglass, Baraka appears to have painted an orchid, a spoon. In Blooming Lycoris, she depicts a webbed foot, an egg. But these familiar images are so decontextualised – so buried in unusual colours and surrounded by otherworldly forms – that the overall effect is surreal. By drawing from a wide variety of references, both tangible and imagined, her compositions are too real to be nonsensical, but too dreamy to be clear. These are uncanny images depicting bodies – indistinguishable bodies: curvaceous, organic forms – animals, perhaps, or amoebas; aliens or monsters. The uncanny corporeality of Baraka’s works seems absurd, but it touches on a familiar anxiety: seeing but not understanding. A tension made bearable through a rendered sugariness of colour and a levity of touch.

Lee uses a combination of techniques – photogravé, debossing, drawing with sumi ink – she creates light, airy compositions that are minimal but, nevertheless, achieve an extraordinary amount of depth. Much like the clouds that serve as oft-sought inspiration for the artist, they appear, at once, mountainous and featherweight. Clouds, says Lee, are an embodiment of qi, the vital force that, according to Chinese cosmology, flows through all living things. By using sumi ink––which is made by mixing animal fat with soot, leftovers of fire and smoke Lee is interested in capturing this: the vitality of the liminal – those effusive, spiritual states in which the self is suspended, for a moment, to commune with the grace of all things.

This is an exhibition of peradams. A fictional object described in Daumal’s novel asa precious sphere that is hard as a diamond and transparent as air, visible only to those who seek it. The artworks bid the viewer to err on the mystical side of thinking suggesting: “the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

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