Karen Azoulay

13 April 2006 - 20 May 2006
Opening Reception 13 April 2006 8pm

Front Gallery:

The Evening Canopy and the Sunset Hour

Karen Azoulay constructs a grotto in the gallery, complete with shells, cascades of water, and, at least occasionally, a live tutelary spirit. These traditional trappings of the grotto, however, lie on the outside walls of her fabricated cave. Stepping in through the portal, one enters a darkened place of pure colour, graduated from a vivid orange-yellow at the far reaches, to crimson, red, and purple, and then to a midnight blue directly overhead. Within the enclosed space, the artist creates a semblance of the twilight sky. Exterior becomes interior, the vast celestial expanse fills a delimited area, and the heavens exist underground. Azoulay turns the grotto inside out. This reversal does not diminish the enchantment of the cave, however, for evening is the time of secrets and the supernatural. Night has long been attached to the female, and Diana was also the goddess of the moon. And, perhaps, it is the sunset hour—that liminal moment between dayand night, light and dark, between definitions or states of being—that most conjures the unknown and embodies the ineffable.

Text by Joseph R. Wolin, 2006