Marisa Takal’s exhibition of new work, Pathfinders, stages nine painted doors in concert with one another. The doors explode with hallucinatory color: lush hues skate across their surfaces in configurations ranging from fractal, to liquid, to luminous. What is inside, and what is outside? Pathfinders troubles these distinctions, presenting doors as complex entities in their own right rather than utilitarian devices. Whatever the door, separation is implicit – between interior and exterior, public and private, between free and captive, life and death. The twentieth century saw the mass production of doors as a means of both separation and security – in the postwar suburban home, but also in the prison, the asylum, and the hospital. Pathfinders recontextualizes this era of standardization. Hung side by side, the doors are liberated from the labor of shutting, locking, and trapping. Both sides are visible and vibrant. The distinction between inside and outside is moot. No longer instrumentalized towards the work of securitization or partition, Takal’s doors hang together in affective harmony. If these doors were once closed, Takal’s emanations have picked the locks, setting dynamite to their mechanisms of enclosure. To put words to these doors both reduces and confines them. Exhibition on view from April 19th through June 7th.
New York City, NY; NYC