Curated in collaboration with Francesca Altamura, Jack Barrett presents The Moon is Just the Sun at Night, a group exhibition that brings together works exploring the interconnectedness of our earthly lives and the mysteries beyond. While some of the exhibited artists explore themes of fear, tension, and existential unease through foreboding compositions and haunting netherworlds, others construct celestial and ethereal sanctuaries. Notions of lightness and darkness morph together and change shape across subjectivities – one person’s light is another’s dark, and what one considers heavenly, others may see as hellacious.

The global origins of the exhibited artists provides a richness that weaves geographically-specific concerns and epistemic commitments. Some artists investigate transformations, re/births, and religion seen through new lenses, and others negotiate with alienation, resistance to violent assimilation, and survival. Amid the dark, staggering lyricisms of their works, an astonishing corpus of paintings and sculpture have been brought forth to ignite conversation on what is repressed beneath surfaces that we construct. Surfaces that, for many of us, are crucial mechanisms for survival.

When navigating survival in late modernity, how do the spheres and sensations of the digital, the cosmic, and the earthly collide? How can artistic intervention productively access existential and emotional peace? Motohiro Takeda seeks to address these concerns, establishing an astute maneuvering of raw, organic, and found materials in his sculptural practice. Nature functions as a medium here, but is also representational in Elizabeth Tibbetts’s landscape oil paintings, where Tibbetts aims to emphasize alienation and isolation in cold, austere, elemental settings.

Religious iconography and undertones figure prominently in this group exhibition, but these undertones materialize through revisionist yet progressive histories that untangle domination and top-down religious hierarchy. For further reflection on these themes and the use of religious iconography across different historical contexts, consider the works of Harry Gould Harvey IV, Ryan Driscoll, Y. Malik Jalal, and Grace Bromley. In their practice, references pertaining to the religious and the mystical are deconstructed and reinterpreted alongside their own personal narratives.

Diasporic meditations also play a crucial role in this exhibition. Some artists engage with these themes unconsciously, influenced by their cultural histories, while others address them with deliberate focus. Chantal Khoury’s work is concerned with historical materials that follow human migration, specifically reflecting on her family’s Lebanese ancestry. In Ilya Fedetov-Federov’s work, two forms of departure inform his painting practice: exile from Russia as a queer man, and a digression from his scientific background to an artistic one. The creatures who foreground his paintings can be viewed as a mirror to his own history, as he carves out a new life as an artist in New York City.

Migration, transformation, or any kind of movement often relies on the symbolism of a portal. In Erica Mao’s work, her spatial dynamics defy the coordinates of realism. Undulating, abstracted figures are temporally paused in these spaces that suggest imminent change for the artist’s shadow-self. Peter Campbell depicts thresholds in his exhibited works, using tiny brushstrokes that complete a dynamic whole. Through the portal of her own body, Mercedes Llanos’s bright, fiery painting represents the recent birth of her son. More architecturally explicit are Genevieve Goffman’s intricate 3D-printed sculptures, where one might like to shrink themselves and find out where those otherworldly gateways may lead.

Artistic intervention, as shown in the exhibition, can function as a salve—and as a salvation—to the artists who are gifted and brave enough to share the inner workings of their souls. Cultural history is full of gaps and lapses, many of which are only observable upon deep reflection of eclipsed impressions. The artist as cultural interpreter and visual historian, expressing themselves kinetically, allows the viewer to begin a perception that addresses the deep, collective wounds of a given place and time.

–Kristen Cochrane, writer and researcher