Soft Vision and Frustrated Gazes at SooVAC

Two shows up now at Soo Visual Arts Center, Syed Hosain’s Across from Paradise and Amanda Hamilton’s Dark Adaptations, each deal in their own ways with frustrated sight and the process of getting lost in an image. Hamilton tasks herself with making something as liquid and abstract as darkness — along with all the freedom it can offer one’s mind — into an object. Meanwhile, Hosain’s pieces lean into the conundrum of privileged viewing, specifically from the West looking eastward.

Syed Hosain, Remembering The Future, acrylic on canvas

Upon my visit, I moved first into the great, wide, white rooms where Hosain’s paintings were hung. North by Northwest was certainly a draw. Stretching over most of the wall, tall and wide, it is an enormous canvas of shining, caked acrylic paint, a style that pervades the collection. A chasm of junky darkness, suggestive of some lost, blocky structures, looms over dank hues of dirty water. There is a strange blueness tinging the water, despite the mountains of acrylic trash heaped around it and the hazy cloud of reds and oranges that looms beyond it. Not even a mushroom cloud, it is the memory of a mushroom cloud. Just below, slightly within the haze is one clear image — a small, distant photo of Mt. Rushmore. Four gray faces peer out, serenely and blankly, in a certain type of gaze that is suggested in many of the paintings that follow. It is a distant stare, one that comes from afar, maybe from paradise. In his artist statement, Hosain describes it as the “privileged perspective.”

The installation is like watching the news at any given point in the last twenty or so years and bearing witness to its reel of war footage. Despite the regularity of these images in American news, there is still a vagueness to them. The locations all blur together in their dustiness, as boots land on new grounds and drones strike new civilian-populated areas. We never saw what places like Iraq or Afghanistan looked like before the United States waged war on them, or Syria before its long, devastating civil war. So there is some mystery, something unsettling in all the dust and rubble. What did they look like before?

Syed Hosain, Across From Paradise, acrylic on canvas

In Bad Moon Rising, a photo of what might be the dots of people’s heads sits at the base of another red mushroom cloud. Yet it’s too blurry; it’s hard to see if there really are people below the cloud. All there is to see is loss, and a loss that is not yours is difficult to make sense of. At times, Hosain does present images of total obscurity, such as in Broken Minarets, one of the most ghostly paintings in the collection. It suggests, with its name, a complete loss of structure. It offers only more questions.

Syed Hosain, The Blind Sheikh, acrylic on canvas

Faces as much as places are blurred beyond recognition. The Registry, Slur, and Good Times Are Killing Me are all portraits of people whose features are only suggested behind the fuzzy paint smears that obscure them. Like the landscapes of wreckage that otherwise make up the collection, identity itself can be obscured by violence. This obscurity may inspire a rewrite of the narrative (by way of using a slur as a name, or a registry to designate personhood) to help the viewer of this violent fall-out justify it all. But the gaze of the one seeing the paintings isn’t the only gaze involved here. Hosain seems to resist the simple objectification of Middle Eastern war images by Western viewers by creating a sense that from within the wreckage, something looks back, persisting even in its destroyed state. Hosain deftly instills the whole collection with the tensions of these gazes—those from paradise, those from the place paradise has destroyed, and those which seek to destroy paradise, as in The Blind Sheikh, a portrait of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the militant Islamist leader from Egypt who died in prison serving a life sentence for conspiracy to assassinate President Mubarak and to attack multiple American landmarks. As privileged viewers seeing these paintings from the very country which is Hosain’s “paradise,” we are faced with our own limited vision, as well as with the fact that we, too, are the object of a distant voyeur’s gaze.

 

Amanda Hamilton, untitled XXV, acrylic and gold leaf on panel

While there is so much to look at and so much to wonder while moving among Hosain’s paintings, when one moves into Amanda Hamilton’s show, it feels like putting hands over your eyes to rest them. That is partly her goal with Dark Adaptations, a meditation on darkness and its unique ability to let our minds wander. The collection references the “black paintings” by artists Ad Reinhart and Robert Rauschenberg and are a “revisiting and reimaging [of] these concepts that were centered on a very narrow perspective of painting as the mode of [creating] self-sufficient perceptual objects.” While paintings are often objects in their own right, to be considered and to be plumbed for meaning, it seems that Hamilton’s attempt to capture and objectify darkness is meant to turn the viewer’s reflection process back on themselves. But how does one keep darkness still, concentrate it so it may be viewed?

Hamilton works in small squares. These squares line the two walls of the dim room with its warm, serene lighting and soft, velvet seating. Most of these numbered pieces are black, and as you move along the line, they all seem the same at first. Some of the chalky black squares feature flecks of glittering mica or geode particulate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to tell how the components of each piece affect the texture. Things like volcanic black salt are added to XXVII, a material so dark it seems an obvious choice for making up dark paintings. But the color of the materials is not the most important thing here. XV is completely gold, and across from it, XXIX  is black with smears of glitter and bunches of rumply gold flake. Likewise, the all-black pieces feature things like copper filings and wood pulp, added not for their color but their texture.

Amanda Hamilton, untitled XXIX, installation view

It seems that Hamilton’s chief concern is in replicating the things that make up darkness, as a texture and a phenomenon. And like actual darkness, it does not matter what lies within it, just that there are forms, there is texture. While it may seem contradictory to add glittering gold to a collection about darkness, it really isn’t when you consider that light can very much be apart of the makeup of darkness. Just as the pitch black of a rural town at midnight is dark, so is the light of a city, with its rosy light pollution and bright spots of light from traffic, buildings, and streetlamps. The backs of our eyelids when we close them are dark but always in a different way, depending on what light source we looked at last, which will leave some bluish or greenish imprint within the black. Hamilton’s XXII is a bumpy black surface, unremarkable except for the moment your eye catches a hint of cobalt blue, just like one of those imprints we see when we close our eyes. It seems like a trick of the light, a failing of the eye, this clever fleck of blue. XIX looks like glittering pavement, the kind that prompts daydreams as you stare down while out on a walk.

Amanda Hamilton, untitled XXVI; acrylic, wood carvings, leaves, and carbon on panel

After wandering the gallery for an hour, it is nice to be able to sit down on the soft seat cushions and regard Hamilton’s black squares with a soft eye. There is nothing to figure out about them; they’re there as a stand-in for the darkness of the natural world, giving you enough to gaze at while being absent at the same time. Hamilton’s attempt to reference this phenomenon, our reaction to darkness, I think is a successful one. In the exhibition description it says, “Like eyesight adjusting, the more slowly one looks, the more there is to see” and that “dark adaptation” is the process our eyes go through when adjusting to low light. Walking into this space and simply sitting for a while, looking, provides the same soft sensation that taking a walk at night does, or laying in bed alone. Dark Adaptations is a quiet place, a safe place to daydream.

 

Across From Paradise and Dark Adaptations are on view through June 1st at SooVAC. Gallery hours are Wednesdays 11-5pm, Thursdays & Fridays 11-7pm, and Saturdays 11-4pm. There will be a closing reception on Friday, June 1st from 6-9pm, featuring a conversation with the artists at 7pm.

For more info, visit soovac.org.