Finding refuge in magic

 

In Gelare Khoshgozaran’s “U.S. Customs Demands to Know,” packages from the artist’s parents in Tehran become illuminated lanterns. The work is part of the new “Like Magic” show at Mass MoCA. Photo courtesy of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

On the night of the new moon, you can walk into a quiet room with walls like adobe, look up at stars in a clear sky and touch healing earth.

Grace Clark once found a chapel in New Mexico where people would come on pilgrimages to touch the earth and smudge earth on their bodies for a blessing. She found something potent in that place — earth and calm -- when she needed healing.

Clark was interning here at Mass MoCA some years ago, working with the fabrication team who form the museum’s complex art exhibits, when she injured her arm and had to take time to heal — years, she said.

She went home to Minnesota with her parents to recover, and in time, she gradually began to travel. In New Mexico, on a back road, she found a plant nursery that grew native and heirloom plants, and she chose an apple tree for her parents, to thank them for their care. People at the nursery told her to plant the tree at the new moon, to help it grow.

That trip “was a transformational experience for me,” Clark recalled.
Now she is back at Mass MoCA as an artist in the museum’s newest group show, “Like Magic,” which opened Oct. 28. She and nine other artists in the show are seeking ways to grow and go on when life and health and well-being feel fragile.

And once a month, the museum will welcome people into Clark’s work at night.
“We have ways of coping with these things,” Clark said, “religion, ritual.”

And when the structures someone knows no longer hold comfort or strength for them, sometimes they make their own.

Curator Alexandra Foradas said that, in talking with friends and artists, especially since the 2016 election, she has seen creative people looking for solace and strength in challenging times. Some are finding and making their own craft, ritual and spiritual practice.

Many of the artists in this show have felt their voices unheard or silenced, she said — people of color, queer and trans folk and many other voices. And they are making sources of joy and care for the people they love, for the natural world, for themselves.

Magic, Foradas said, can mean different things to different people, from ways of giving power to making and healing -- singing, healing, shaping words and images, cleaning, caring for a person or a house or a garden. Magic can give power to a person’s actions or make them feel most confident in themselves, in whom they love and what they dream.

The artists in this show are exploring what Foradas calls magical technologies — ritual, practice, divination — tools for tapping into a potent agency, conscious or subconscious.

They are all artists she has wanted to work with for some time, she said, and in their recent work she has found common threads among them. They share an urge toward transformation. They feel that all language is divination to imagine a future in the face of the danger and division of the present. Magic becomes a refuge, a place of understanding and hope.

 

Starlight and music
Clark is making a space for reflection. Wooden sculptures suggest canes or crutches. A window holds the kind of night sky now rare outside places like the high desert in New Mexico, far enough from city lights to show a deep density of stars.

When her grandfather died, she said, she found some comfort in the night sky. The natural world, and the sense of different scales of time and space, felt more real than the organized religion she had grown up with. She thinks of the stars people recognize, the stars that feel familiar as the seasons change. Cassiopeia, for her, becomes a sign of continuity.

In the work of the Dine (Navajo) artist Raven Chacon, the walls are singing. He creates images that translate into musical scores, Foradas explained.

“His musical scores are maps to alternate realities,” she said. “These are maps to a reality where women have always been believed to be people who can and should hold positions as leaders.
Chacon includes many scores here, portraits of Indigenous women-identifying folk and of composers who’ve had an influence on his own music. They scores become portals, Foradas said, doors into possible worlds.

On a larger score on the wall, symbols trace music Chacon imagines played outdoors on amplified guitar. His scores lift off the page and into conversations with the players: He asks the musicians to look around and see the living beings around them, to be in conversation with their surroundings.

“His practice runs counter to the structure in Western music, where the composer tells the musicians, ‘This is how fast you’re going to play, how long,’” Foradas explained. “He has score notations inviting the musician to choose how long to play. … He might not say improvisation, but he gives room for interpretation.”

In a Dine performance circle, she said, musicians may play together all night, as they repeat and re-form and sink into a melody. A musician who comes in not knowing the song can learn it through that repetition, a practice similar in some ways to an African drum circle or an Irish music jam.

Chacon values oral traditions and histories, Foradas said. As he honors Indigenous peoples and cultures who have persevered through loss, and through Western efforts to erase their ways of being, he holds open spaces for many voices and perspectives.

The artists in the show are joining him in sharing stories. They have recommended a library of books as part of the exhibit. And people who come to the show can look through the books, sit and read, and suggest their own additions to the collection.

“We’re inviting a library to be a conversation,” Foradas said, among the books and the artworks and the people taking them in. “That’s not how we often talk about libraries, but that’s absolutely what they are.”

 

Horses and a family history
Nate Young, an artist based in Chicago, has created a body of work from his family’s relationships with horses.

His great-grandfather escaped from the South to the North on horseback, Foradas said. Under threat to his life, he finally felt that he had no choice but to kill the horse — to keep from being traced. Later, in a suicide note, he talked about this decision as an intense regret and gave the location of the horse’s bones.

Young has found that place and gone there to connect with his great-grandfather’s story, Foradas said. He reckons with that pain and intergenerational trauma in his work.

Foradas said Young has talked with her about the idea of Black Un-time, a sense that because of the violence this country often inflicted on Black Americans, their lived experiences often do not fit into the kind of linear time defined by Western culture.

These works hold Young’s wanting to know his great-grandfather and the ancestors whose stories he does not know. In “Divination III and Fugue,” Foradas said, he reaches out across time toward a feeling in the ether, a sense of relationship.

Young now has a horse of his own, Jackson. Among the fragments of the past he has gathered here, he and Jackson re-create an old photograph of his great-grandfather and his horse, and he has recorded oral histories with his family, offered a reliquary to hold shards of the past, and mingled the sounds of his horse’s breathing with his great-grandfather’s name.

 

Finding strength and light
Artists around Young are looking into the power of an object to hold love and force over time.
Rose Salane considers the power in a wedding ring someone wears every day for generations. And Cate O’Connell-Richards imagines the strength and influence of women in the tools of the work they do – like brooms.

Gelare Khoshgozaran interlaces glowing talismans like rhizomes. They are care packages, Foradas explained. Each light illuminates a box that family who live in Tehran have sent her from Iran. They came holding gifts, a book, an element of care for her.

And each of them was subject to warrantless search when they come into the United States. Each one has seen a violation in the conflict between the two countries for more than 40 years. And Khoshgozaran transforms them again into connection.

Magic can become an act of independence and resistance, Foradas said, when the artists feel people in power threaten their existence. And those in power can try to turn the idea of “magic” into something “occult” or fringe or dangerous. As they acknowledge pain and anger and fear, these artists turn the meaning of magic back into light.

Tourmaline, Johanna Hevda and Simone Bailey draw film and music into their practice. Petra Szilagyi is creating an adobe hand-painted prayer room, a space of ritual masks and colored light and up-cycled leather motorcycle jackets, imagining a beneficial future — specifically a future for the Internet, which raises the question: What would that look like?

In the face of vast systems that feel out of control, Clark said, people are making connections as real as holding hands.

Covid has intensified that need, she said, as so many people have grappled with fear of death and larger systems — political, social and environmental — that seem out of control: climate change, an election year, a pandemic.

That feeling of fear “has always been around,” she said. “But we’ve been seeing a wave of people trying to find structure, systems, rituals that give you comfort … in something larger than yourself.”

She sees people turning to the natural world, to creativity and community, looking for something tangible. And coming back to Mass MoCA to make this work has given something to her.
“I feel so cared for,” she said, “not just in the work but as a person. I feel like it’s often hard to be seen as an artist when you’re working in spaces like this … to be seen and taken seriously, and this work is especially healing … to acknowledge both pain and joy in a place where I’ve worked in so many ways.”