In a dark room enveloped in warmth, six wooden, rectangular structures stand. Each has a slit in the side, letting the light spill out and begging the viewer to look in.
Willard Way is a group exhibition in Tjaden Gallery featuring the artists Won Ryu '25, Tim Green ’24, Anna Lu ’24, Cook Shaw ’24, Julien Lavigne ’25, Rhys Healy ’25 and Willem Schreiber ’25. The description notes that each of the exhibitors have lived together at some point in the last five years.
(The following numbering is my own.)
1. Peering into the unit closest to the entrance reveals a series of images, each seemingly mirrored in some way. I see a child blowing bubbles and the slight line where the image is inverted, reflected and re-attached. On another wall, I see scenes of nature symmetrically reflected, forming an abstract expansion of shapes, green streaks of leaves and shrubbery.
A diamond-shaped mirror sits across the gap in the wood. I see parts of images on the wall facing away from me reflected in it: a landscape of lights, a black and white forest. Do I look in and see reflections of a self — how easily we merge with an atmosphere until there is no distinction between us and the nature-people in it?
2. Light spills from two window-like cuts. A flesh-colored form clings to the top, dripping downward yet frozen. I am reminded of clay or another tactile material by the evidence of touch imprinted on the surface. The light aims upward to accentuate the almost grotesque transformation of the medium above. I am fascinated by the lumps and folds, by how my body is related as a flesh-thing bearing marks of transformation. Is this thing coming down onto the light below, reaching for us to envelop us whole? Will it be warm or suffocating or both?
3. Behind a sheet of plastic are blue-green-purple painterly marks, collage-like in the juxtapositions of texture, brush direction and modulations of color. Some areas have swirls of paint dragged across the surface, breaking apart the rhythmic layering of paint. Is this a disruption or perhaps a gentler melding together of calm and uncalm? The pattern looks like it could extend forever and ever (I think there are mirrors on the bottom and top), no distinction between ground-ceiling and in-between. I could feel it in my body, the disruption and ordered marks melding together for infinity, extending ever-upwards and ever-downwards.
And I don’t think this is intentional, but there is a small gap between the wood casting a thin beam of blue light onto the wall behind the unit. It might be accidental, but I like the way the light slips out nonetheless.
4. Look into the backlit space and follow the leaves trickling downward from the ceiling. I immediately think of the word “home,” and the history all these objects must have, even if I can’t quite figure out what they are. A trinket bowl has small seashells filling maybe a sixth of the space. Wooden objects rest beside it. Caught directly in front of the light is a paper pinwheel or maybe flower, utterly still. Red-yellow tapestries drape over the walls. This could be a miniature of someone’s room, so intimate despite its decontextualization. The long shadows cast by each object reach toward me, where I crouch to look so invasively into this bubble of warmth, almost beckoning me to move closer.
5. A searing red light high above my head almost violently bursts from between the crack in the wood. I press my face closer to the rest of the seeming darkness to get a look, and I can make something out, branching out tentatively. I like the idea of light as warning and protection, anchored up top forcing you to wait to look, to press your face against the crack to see beyond the red glare and wait for your eyes to adjust. I am not quite sure what the figure behind the light is, cast in a vivid red glow, but it feels tentatively alive, maybe hiding or lying in wait behind this red loudness.
6. A pirate hat spins like a ceiling fan underneath a flickering yellow lamp. When I get close, I swear I can feel the air moving, a tentative aliveness like the buzzing of cicadas in summer with the light’s modulations and figure-eight of motion. The only piece with motion in the gallery, I cannot help but again feel embodied by the room — the inability to be still and pinned down into one moment and the inability of the light to stay fully focused, constantly wavering.
Tjaden Gallery is not a particularly large space, but the tall and narrow shape of each unit makes me hyper aware of how much space is between each structure, how isolated they are.
Peering through the gaps in the wood feels intrusive, yet the light that spills into the darkness of the gallery is so alive, so inviting. The geometry is inherently protective, reminiscent of a gap made by a door slightly ajar. For all the spaces, the height of the wood and the positioning of the crack makes it impossible to see all of the inside. Am I allowed to look, to gaze in? The more I try to see, the more I cannot help but feel like a voyeur of sorts, yet I desperately want to know more, to slip into the atmosphere of these spaces.
I imagine the units as bodies of sorts, the way a space reflects the person occupying it. Even more, each unit acts like a body with its built-in closed-off-ness and crack of light that feels both accidental and inviting, asking you to look into an ephemeral moment and cautioning against it. What is there to do except tentatively look? What is there to do except try to understand, even though you may never see or speak of it again?
Willard Way is on display in Tjaden Gallery until March 27.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
