Unique Art Experiences: Fireflies on the Water and Between Light and Shadow

Anila Quayyum Agha: Between Light and Shadow.  
The brightly lit triangles rotate slowly, slowly
and shift the patterned shadows on the walls. 

Art installations encompass viewers in up close immersion in the art itself. It's a sensory experience. I'm reminded of Rebecca Louise Law's exhibit "Community," which was a blooming regalia of flowers and plants, garden flowers and Ohio wild flowers, leaf petals, cones and seeds strung in long garlands and magical strands from floor to ceiling. It was like walking into a beautiful painting.

Immersed in Yayoi Kusama's Fireflies on the Water.

Suspended in Infinity.

That 's what it felt like viewing avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's Fireflies on the Water, an installation of lights, water and mirrors. It was a bit disorienting at first. The viewer stands alone on a small platform in the dark surrounded by thousands of colorful lights in what seems like an endless space. Eternity maybe. Infinity. No walls, no boundaries, "no ground below us, above us only sky,"  as John Lennon sang in "Imagine."  I imagined myself floating in space, not as comforting as walking into a field of flowers, but fascinating. After a few seconds I felt as if I was being pulled in a different direction into the unknown. Lights streamed, melted, pulsed together. I found it more scary than exhilarating as the beauty floated away. 

Artist in Polka Dots

The TMA magazine (January-June, 2020) says it was Kusama's wish "to transport viewers to a space that seems endlessly expansive." She has done that. Fireflies on the Water speaks to Kusama's "ongoing investigation, from the time she was a child, into the relationship between ourselves, the space that we occupy, and the ungraspable concept of infinity."  This iconoclastic artist, who loved polka dots, born in 1929, always defied traditional perspectives. Kusama's long life and complex work encompassed quite a journey. 

On our way to the next installation, Anila Quayyum Agha's Between Light and Shadow, we passed a lovely exhibit in Gallery 18 entitled "ONE EACH: Still Lifes by Pissaro, Cezanne, Manet and Friends."  What a nice surprise! This little exhibit features a selection of fine still lifes painted by French artists in the 1860s. It was interesting, familiar, accessible. After floating in space, it brought us down to earth.  "ONE EACH"  examines what  artists were doing in the 1860s that point to the future, especially to Impressionism. These artists had different perspectives, objects, composition, but they were lovely depictions of the tangible world, the pure joy of "visual splendor," as curator Lawrence W. Nichols put it.  It made me think as well about the still lifes painted by women aritsts during the same era, such a rich treasure often hidden, perhaps a future TMA exhibit. 

Teddy and I between light and shadow.

We entered Between Light and Shadow with our feet firmly planted on the ground, but our eyes looking to the heavens. That's how the light and shadows felt as we adjusted ourselves beween them. We walked into rooms with shadows on the walls, not visual art, not paintings, not still lifes, but  stunning Illuminated objects. I caught Teddy in the shadows because the lighted structure was almost too bright.  We adjusted ourselves. 

Only after reading Pakistani-American artist Agha's description of her installation did I grasp its meaning. Adjusting ourselves was really the whole point of this installation.  

"Having lived on the boundaries of different faiths such as Islam and Christianity, and in cultures like Pakistan and the United States, my art is deeply influenced by the simultaneous sense of alienation and transience that informs the migrant experience."  (TMA magazine, Fall 2019).

For women artists contemporary with the artists featured in the ONE EACH exhibit:  https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/19wa/hd_19wa.htm, the Met's Heillbrun Timeline, "Women Artists in 19th Century France."