ART CITIES: N.York-Tau Lewis

Tau Lewis constructs intricate sculptural portraits and quilts using found, gathered, gifted and recycled materials drawn from personal environments in Toronto, New York and her family home in Negril, Jamaica. Lewis continues a long history of black cultural production, using found objects available to her and reconfiguring these in a manner similar to a hip-hop or jazz musician.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo David Zwirner Gallery

In her solo exhibition “Populi, Vox Dei”  Tau Lewis presents new works. Employing various sculptural techniques, Lewis creates colorful, totemic forms that suggest mythical territories beyond our own. At the gallery, the artist presents a group of six new sculptures created from salvaged textiles and other found materials in a polygonal installation that l serve as a stage for an inaudible conversation. Following her presentation “Divine Giants Tribunal” at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Lewis continues to create anthropomorphic forms inspired by those in Yoruban mask dramas that 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 joyful 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. Inspired by the contemporary work of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, such as his 1973 play “The Bacchae of Euripides”; classical Greek and Roman mythology and drama; science-fiction stories by the likes of Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula K. Le Guin; and angelology (the theological dogma concerning the study of angels) Lewis expands the narrative and world-building possibilities of her own characters in “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”. The figures, some of whom appear in other guises throughout her various bodies of work, populate Lewis’s domain with not only their presence and associated fables but also with what the artist terms their “material DNA” the genetic thread that binds them together. By using donated, damaged, or unwanted leather goods; saving and reconstituting scraps from previous projects; and working with an inheritance of nearly one hundred abandoned coats from a Long Island furrier, Lewis likewise preserves the essence of the previous lives of these materials; she painstakingly stitches their histories into each mask. A piece of every sculpture from her archive is embedded into each new work, creating a genealogical tree rooted in our world by its familiar component parts. The sculptures are a convergence of our collective histories and the social imaginary. Translated from Latin as “the voice of the people [is] the voice of god,” the exhibition’s title, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, can be traced back to the 14^th century but is primarily associated with the original name of a British Whig party tract from 1709. Revised and expanded the following year and retitled “The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations Concerning the Rights, Power, and Prerogative of Kings and the Rights, Privileges, and Properties of the People,” this document is understood to be one of the formative writs of European democracy. Using the dictum “vox populi, vox Dei” as an expansive descriptor of humankind’s historical relationships to its own belief systems, Lewis’s exhibition connects this secular democratic treatise with a world of her own creation in which faith, myth, and drama overlap.

Photo: Tau Lewis, Symphony, installation view at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. Photo: NGC

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 52 Walker Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 28/10/2022-7/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/