Ordinary or fanciful from Lauren Scavo-Fulk and Eric Celarier; cosmic or internal from Lia Halloran and Imo Nse Imeh; untraditional quilting from Sheila Crider
By Mark Jenkins
BLACK HOLES AREN’T BLACK IN LIA HALLORAN’S PAINTINGS. The paintings in “Warped Side,” the California artist’s show at the National Academy of Sciences, are predominantly blue and thus, on first look, have an aquatic vibe. But Halloran’s pictures were originally made for The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, a book co-written with astrophysicist Kip Thorne, a Caltech professor, NAS member and Nobel Prize winner. About 30 of the 650 paintings, which depict the phenomena listed in the book’s title, are on display.
The pictures exhibited here were executed on clear plastic, whose non-absorbent nature leads the pigment to pool and shimmer. Even if the paintings are not read as watery, their liquid quality makes them appear kinetic. This is ideal for renderings in which celestial forms seem to spin, throb, and emanate. An animated video of some of the illustrations makes them dance, but they effectively convey motion even when the gestures don’t literally move.
While the scale of Halloran’s works is often cosmic, the show includes personal touches. Amid the pictures are poems by Thorne, whose response to the universe is lyrical as well as scientific. Halloran’s spouse, Felicia, is portrayed as a space traveler, and a scene of a tree-lined street features a walker who might be Thorne. People who watch the skies must do so from a place on Earth, awed from an everyday vantage point.
There’s a swirling quality to some of the drawing-paintings in Imo Nse Imeh’s “Monuments to Our Skies,” also at NAS. Black men’s faces, rendered in charcoal, are embedded within colorful spatters of watery acrylic paint. But the liquid gestures don’t represent the same thing they do in Halloran’s work.
The “Bioforms” pictures were made in 2023-24 for covers of the Yale Journal of Biological Psychiatry, and visualize complex identities and the collective healing from historical trauma. The splashes could represent external pressures or inner struggles, or both. The show’s other entries are from a separate series, “Divinity,” which reimagines “Icarus as an African boy.”
A U.S.-born Nigerian-American, Imeh teaches at Massachusetts’s Westfield State University. According to exhibition text, there are “elements of self-portraiture” in his work. Some of the artworks clearly speak to a larger community, as is most explicit in “Ascension,” in which multiple faces are linked by a curved line and ribbons of poured color. Yet Imeh is most likely to depict the Black experience as something that’s been internalized. The multi-layered “Epilogue” depicts a man whose chest is transparent so that his heart is visible, and whose face is by a cascade of blood-red paint. The link between a single soul and the wider world is palpable.