Religion isn’t usually a big topic in contemporary art, but two quietly exquisite exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland challenge that notion from divergent yet sympathetic viewpoints. Both shows are on view through June 1.
The museum’s first three floors are now hosting the U.S. debut exhibition of works by Harminder Judge, a onetime performance artist based in London who now creates large scale installations that evoke religious shrines and ritual settings, but without referring to any specific faith.
A native of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England, Judge, born in 1982, has said he was influenced as a teen by traveling to Amritsar in Punjab, India, to participate in Sikh funeral rites for a granduncle. He witnessed the preparation of the body and a funeral pyre, spent the night with family members watching the flames, and then saw them collect ashes, bone fragments and jewelry the next morning.
Last year, Judge told the online publication ArtReview.com that he sees his art as an exploration of transformation, of the “material becoming immaterial.’’
At moCa, Judge is displaying a series of large rectangular, wall-mounted panels made by pouring pigment-dyed plaster and polymer into a shallow mold, which he agitates and swirls before the mix hardens. When polished, the panels reveal flowing abstractions that are integrated into the plaster, rather than poured on canvas like the 1960s Color Field paintings of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.
Judge’s panels are somewhat like richly veined slabs of polished stone. They have sculptural heft, but they enable the eye to peer into their depths, as if they were paintings, or windows into another world.
For example, a Judge installation in a second-floor gallery conjures a religious shrine. Viewers are greeted by two converging, diagonal walls that look as if they were part of an Indiana Jones temple hidden deep in a jungle.
A narrow gap between the walls admits viewers into a squarish room that feels like a sanctum sanctorum. On the walls are three sets of paired, book-matched plaster panels that function somewhat like Rorschach patterns. They are filled with nebulae of color that resemble storm clouds, tornadoes or nuclear explosions speckled by torrents of black rain. Overall, they seem to depict everlasting cycles of creation, destruction and rebirth.
Throughout the show, which also includes a wall-size mural of color-impregnated plaster panels and a video recording of a street performance Judge choreographed in London, viewers are free to come up with their own interpretations. Judge’s work teases the mind as if his creations were relics from a civilization whose explanatory texts have been lost or can’t be translated.
In addition to being Judge’s U.S. museum debut, the show is the first organized at moCa by DJ Hellerman, a native Northeast Ohioan who joined the institution last year as deputy director and senior curator.
Works by Gala Porras-Kim
The main companion show at moCa focuses on works by Gala Porra-Kim, an American artist of Korean and Colombian heritage born in Bogota in 1984.
Now based in Los Angeles, Porras-Kim creates two-dimensional works and installations that communicate subtle critiques of present-day museum practices. Her notion, explored by numerous artists in recent decades, is to expose the ways in which museums embody hidden systems of power and cultural control.
The exhibition at moCa, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, shows that the ideas that motivate Porras-Kim are sometimes more interesting than the objects they generate.
One example: To demonstrate how the physical context of a museum can literally shape what’s on view, Porras-Kim is using a dehumidifier mounted near a gallery ceiling to channel droplets of water through a suspended sling of burlap soaked with liquid graphite and ink.
The droplets, condensed from the museum’s own air, distribute the ink and graphite, drop by drop, to a white panel on the floor below. On the walls surrounding the moCa example are other splatter paintings made the same way by Porras-Kim at museums across the Americas.
The installation makes its point, but once you get it there’s not much reason to linger. The paintings that emerge from Porras-Kim’s automatic process are less than compelling.
Far stronger is a three-part depiction of an ancient Korean grave enclosure, or dolmen. Two drawings depict the dolmen’s flaking, lichen-covered exterior with quasi-photographic precision — one in color, the other in black-and-white. The third is an almost uniform field of charcoal gray graphite., It conveys the silent darkness of the dolmen’s interior from the viewpoint of the person buried within.
This visually seductive trio of drawings encourages a viewer to ponder exactly what the dolmen, which may be as old as 12,000 years, might have meant to its original creators.
Another installation by Porras-Kim reproduces two large greenstone stelae, or monolithic obelisks, found beneath the platform at the summit of the ancient Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, about 25 miles northeast of Mexico City. Combined with them is another large drawing in black graphite, again depicting the dark interior silence of the shrine that once contained the stelae.
In a letter addressed to the Mexican cultural leaders that is framed under glass and hung on a wall as part of the ensemble, Porras-Kim asks them to consider installing her replicas at the top of the pyramid in place of the original stelae, which now reside in a museum.
She suggests in her letter that the gods once honored at the site might still be around, despite the colonial conquest of Mexico, and that today’s cultural officials would be wise show respect and “to somewhat cover your bases with forces greater than us.’’
By making such a point, Porras-Kim asks the viewers to consider the beliefs of long-lost civilizations as still valid. Her humility and empathy for other cultures rhymes with the spiritual wonder radiated by Judge’s installations. Together, they bring a subtle and refreshing sense of awe to moCa.
