The suspended form absorbed and fragmented two video projections at once, exuding a quality that was both permeable and impenetrable. The work made formal and metaphorical use of two aspects inherent to horse hair: that it stirs like breath with the movement of air, and that it gathers light and becomes a luminous presence. Both qualities were structural to the piece; the cube behaved less like a fixed object than like something alive, responsive to its environment in real time.
Projected through the hair were images of the non-built world, where imagination and dreaming reside. Within the cube, these moving images refracted and expanded into a dimensionality that allowed viewers to see within them rather than simply observe their surface. The container was porous: light and the shadows cast by the hair spilled past its edges onto a scrim beyond, where window-sized images of the built world, the world stepped from upon entering the site, appeared and dissolved. A structure exploded, collapsed, and reconstituted as a ghost of itself before disappearing into the waves. Coyotes and birds moved through the four-dimensional space like messengers.
The accompanying soundtrack moved between vastness and intimacy, layering breath, voice, purring, bird wings in flight, waves, and a passing helicopter. It began with a field recording made inside the Stagehouse itself before it was reopened to the public, at a time when the space was inhabited by pigeons, and light entered only through cracks in its boarded-up windows.
Young’s broader practice met moments of collective breakdown, the collapsing biosphere, war, the loss of language, place, and relationship, as matters of the soul, where collective history and personal story merge. “With the disappearance of habitat,” she said, “by human encroachment, rising seas, genocide, and ecocide, comes the loss of memory, language, and sense of belonging: the tethers that bind us against fragmentation.” Set inside a building that was itself an example of decay met with revitalization, Holding Light Sutra became a search for “intimacy and a belonging arrived at after brokenness.”
Holding Light Sutra was on view weekends, 12–5 pm, through July 12, at Safe Harbors’ Ritz Theater Stagehouse, 100 Ann Street, Newburgh, NY. A documentary screening and closing reception took place on July 12.
by Daisy Wu
Images courtesy of STRONGROOM and the artist. Photography by Pete Mauney.
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