Tau Lewis, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Installation View), via Art Observed
This month in New York, artist art Tau Lewis presents a body of new works at 52 Walker in Manhattan, compiling a range of works by the artist that underscores her interrogation and examination of mythology, material and form through a range of large-scale pieces. Lewis, whose work often uses densely layered material in pursuit of mythical and surreal figures, here renders a series of large-scale busts that feel immediate and otherworldly, examining real-world rituals and reconstructed emotional landscapes.
Tau Lewis, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Installation View), via Art Observed
Employing various sculptural techniques, Lewis creates colorful, totemic forms that suggest mythical territories beyond our own. Here, the artist presents a group of six new sculptures created from salvaged textiles and other found materials in a polygonal installation that serves as a stage for an inaudible conversation. The monumental forms—which range from seven to over thirteen feet tall—will uphold a corporeal arena for those who move between temporal and heavenly realms.
Tau Lewis, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Installation View), via Art Observed
Following her presentation Divine Giants Tribunal at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Lewis continues to create anthropomorphic forms inspired by those in Yoruban mask dramas—ones which are spiritually activated by the wearer and the audience, and, by extension, their community. In creating the masks, Lewis develops their identities and narratives in an intermediary world that implicates our ancestral pasts, spiritual and cultural similitudes, and multiplanar existences. Deriving concepts from eschatology, Vox Populi, Vox Dei puts forth a declaration of being: taking the form of a stage on which to enact and actuate this ethereal sphere, the installation employs the apocalypse not as a vehicle for destruction but rather as a platform for transformation.
Tau Lewis, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Installation View), via Art Observed
Dialogue seems to pervade the work on view, as if the viewer found themselves in the midst of an unfamiliar ritual, or a moment of convergence of various gods and mystic figures. The sheer scale and volume of these works emphasizes that notion, their size and presentation giving the sensation of being out of one’s element, in the presence of visages well beyond their comprehension. Placed in the midst of such dynamic forms and powerful representations, the show gives one pause to consider their own role in this relationship.
The show closes January 7th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Tau Lewis at David Zwirner [Exhibition Site]
