It Begins With Knowing And Not Knowing

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Patrick Cruz, “flesh and blood,” from the “Windows to Akasha” series, 2024, oil on canvas (courtesy of the artist, photo by NK Photo)

It begins with knowing and not knowing – so goes the title of the exhibition currently on view at Richmond Art Gallery (RAG) until Sept. 29. It marks the starting point for those driven to uncover something more in this world, beyond whatever can be seen at face value. 

Curator Zoë Chan’s phrasing is precisely inexact, landing on unfocussed pathways that determine one’s search for spiritual truth. She calls on art’s capacity to ask questions as a method of open exploration. 

The artists in this group show are well matched. Rebecca Bair, Xinwei Che, Patrick Cruz, Zoë Kreye, Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Michelle Sound and Ximena Velázquez (La PosmoBaby) each explore sources of knowledge beyond the status quo in their artwork, subverting or resisting the promises of organized religion, making art that challenges existing pedagogies and institutions, and involves the body in gathering new knowledge.  

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Xinwei Che, “車昕蔚, To hold myself 空间的拥抱,” detail, 2024, video, clay, water (courtesy of the artist, photo by NK Photo)

Several of the artworks appear as the product of automatic practice or psychography, where the artist practitioners become a conduit for spiritual messaging. Che’s installation, To hold myself, combines hand-formed clay greenware with video documentation of her process. Unfired air-dried vessels contain pools of water that change the surface of her material over time, leaving her muscular impressions cracked in places, runny in others. In the accompanying video, Che wedges and rolls clay against her bare legs, entwining with her medium in responsive collaboration. 

Cruz’s series of paintings, Windows to Akasha, are visual translations of the artist’s past life regression therapy. Cruz, known for his maximalist tendencies — large scale installations, pattern repetition en masse, and wild colour stories — delivers a more composed vision of his mystical pathway. Here he works in smaller scale, where the size of his canvases lends an interesting limitation to the seeming limitlessness of his spiritual visions. Instead of expanding laterally in size, differently for Cruz, motion and colour seem to press outward toward the viewer through layer and expression.

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Installation view from left to right: Zoë Kreye, “An Invitation,” 2024, voile curtains, gold lamé, cotton ribbons, clay, dried flowers, massage table, flannel sheet; Rebecca Bair, “Hair as Ritual,” 2024, cyanotype on cotton (courtesy of the artists and W Projects, photo by NK Photo)

As Kreye describes, in her practice, her body is a kind of “tuning fork” that channels energy, leaving traces of her ritual flow in her textile, clay, painting and movement pieces. In her installation, An Invitation, Kreye cuts portals and archways into soft fabric suspensions, and she presses her body into clay or records her movement practice in paint. Her space delivers the audience to an open feminized energy. 

The dynamic rituals that inform Kreye’s work are elided, leaving the art behind as record of her practice. Somehow, the spiritual energy Kreye seeks to reproduce does seem rather general. What is this new knowledge her body accesses and to what or whose benefit does it serve? The installation hosts a kind of energy that seemingly has no place to go. 

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Michelle Sound, “Michel Band,” detail, 2024, monochrome print on paper, embroidery thread, seed beads, caribou hair tufting, porcupine quills, rick rack, mink pom poms, bugle beads (courtesy of the artist and CEREMONIAL / ART, photo by NK Photo)

In Hair as Ritual, Bair makes cyanotypes of her hair and hair extensions that assert the presence of her Black body, recording wispy electric-like markings in photosensitive chemicals. Hung in life-size hollow cylinders, the fabric demonstrates a ghostly quality that challenges the spectre of colonial haunting. Bair’s works are complemented by Michelle Sound’s cyanotype drums that host multiple images of the artist’s mother and draw her ancestral presence into the room by the drums’ call to ceremony.

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Ximena Velázquez (La PosmoBaby), Tortillera, detail, 2024, video, ribbons, fabric flowers, synthetic hair braids, curtains, fabric frame and sublimation print on fabric (courtesy of the artist, photo by NK Photo)

Along with Bair and Sound, video works by Obuwoma and Velásquez substantially challenge prescribed colonial identities. While Obuwoma’s video piece unfolds the cycle of trauma endured in Nigerian Catholic Boarding School, Velásquez deftly challenges the heteronormative family structure of her Mexican childhood. In obvious difference in style, the two videos are installed across from each other as if in conversation – each differently feeding hungry femme bodies toward satisfaction. 

It begins with knowing and not knowing demonstrates the path towards spiritual knowledge as a fever dream. Meaning is evasive, yet somehow within our grasp. ■

It begins with knowing and not knowing is on view at Richmond Art Gallery (RAG) until Sept. 29. It features work from Rebecca Bair, Xinwei Che, Patrick Cruz, Zoë Kreye, Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Michelle Sound, and Ximena Velázquez (La PosmoBaby).

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