Audra Wist
Lodestar
April 9th - May 8th, 2022
Visit our page on Artsy for additional context and online acquisition options.
AUDRA WIST
Lodestar
April 9th - May 8th, 2022
Opening reception April 9th, 3pm - 6pm
Audra Wist’s latest exhibition consists of heavily inked and wrought drawings depicting the premier symbol of feminine fashion – the high heel. The pumps lining the walls of the gallery are furiously portrayed in high contrast streaks of ink, roaring at us, daring us to call them chic. Wist works variably across mediums; sometimes opting to publish poetry and photography, other times unleashing gesturally with drawing. This new body of work sustains her ongoing mode of volatile meditation, obsessively reproducing shoes that walk (stomp) about, despite being disembodied. The heels of LODESTAR confront the viewer like a sexy, brazen socialite at a party, but don’t wait around for answers.
A LODESTAR IS NOT A LIGHTHOUSE, A LIGHTHOUSE IS NOT A HOUSE
The earliest known copies of the gospel of Luke document the birth of Jesus Christ, including the virgin birth, the prophecy that incensed King Herod, and the noted Star of Bethlehem. This star prompted a few wise men to travel to Jerusalem, a city just north of Bethlehem. In Greek, the “Wise Men" (μαγοι) would have also translated into “astronomers” indicating special knowledge of the cosmos. The early keepers of the gospel texts regarded astronomy as a heretical, pagan practice, but the translation remains.
Western civilization’s ceaseless obsession with biblical texts has led many to try to identify the “real” Star of Bethlehem. The most likely explanation is that it wasn’t a star at all. Modern astronomers suppose that if anyone saw anything that night, it would have been an eclipse of Jupiter by our moon, producing a meager twinkling effect that these wise men mistook for a star on a cloudless night.
A failure of popular science today is the widespread belief that planetary orbits are clockwork. Our notions of the cosmos are ingrained with a Newtonian sense of predictability. The sun will rise and fall in the same routine it always does, gravitational maneuvers will persist with ironclad fortitude, but this is not true. Our comprehension of cosmic mechanics has grown since King Herod’s time, and we’ve become nascently aware of the concept of chaos. There is no scientific law that promises perpetuity. Chaos is also popularly misunderstood. Chaos is the low hum of miscellaneous activity at every level of existence.
Not unlike the mistaken eclipse of Jupiter for a star, art can be mistaken for the residue of human chaos assembled into order. Or the reverse, as is lauded in the genre of “action painting.” There’s a quaint notion that ink and paint gesturally advanced across surfaces is the acute output from a pure agent of a divine chaos. A fetishization of the auteur: one who has been prompted to channel something ethereally magnificent or even spiritually inane.
-Christian Hendricks