Peering (2019)

Object Constellation — Objects from Various Times and Places

Oil on canvas, 30×36”

Peering stages two figures at opposite edges of the composition, each absorbed in a gaze that reaches beyond the visible world. On the right, a woman stands within a field of warm yellows and reds; on the left, a man is enveloped in deep, cool blue. Between them, two additional men appear mid‑conversation in the receding space, their exchange suggesting a moment suspended across time. The ground beneath them feels uncertain, as if the painting’s spatial logic is shifting underfoot.

At the center of this layered field sits a small bronze “Ethiopian” youth, drawn from a sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I place him not as an object of study but as a point of orientation — a historical presence held within a landscape that resists ordinary depth. His stillness becomes the fulcrum around which the painting’s temporal and emotional currents turn.

Around him, other forms drift in and out of legibility. A Kota reliquary figure hovers above, echoing themes of memory and ancestral guardianship. These figures were not worn as masks; they were placed atop bark boxes or baskets filled with ancestor bones, their gleaming surfaces acting as protectors of lineage. Their presence here extends the painting’s meditation on continuity and the ways cultural symbols carry the weight of remembrance.

Near the bottom right, a stylized Chiwara headdress — a major ritual form of the Bamana (Bambara) people of Mali — enters the constellation. In Bamana mythology, Chiwara is a divine, half‑human, half‑animal being who taught humanity how to cultivate the land. Its elegant, geometric silhouette captivated early twentieth‑century European modernists, and its appearance in Peering reflects my ongoing interest in how forms migrate across cultures, eras, and emotional registers.

Surrounded by these works in museums and through years of study, I became attuned to the formal, social, and emotional links that bind them. Their movement across time and place raises questions about how symbols endure, transform, and challenge the narratives we inherit — offering validation, contradiction, and new possibilities for seeing.