New Orleans-based artist Erica Westenberger’s Our Shadows, Spilling Together, currently on view at Wedgewood-Houston gallery Neue Welt, is a sculptural installation that examines the challenges contemporary women face balancing family, career and beauty standards. What makes it stand out from ubiquitous identity-focused shows is its innovative deployment of unique materials, its preference for poetic imagery over polemics, and the way it connects 21st-century anxieties and conflicts to timeless myths and mystical stories that redirect human failings back toward the reassuring patterns of the natural order.
Westenberger’s installation delineates a liminal space. In ancient magical traditions, treelines, foothills and the edges of rivers and streams were in-between places — locations where a person might pass through a portal to another reality, or perhaps some otherworldly creature might pass into ours. Dawn and dusk — and the days that mark the transitions between the seasons — might offer the same opportunities. Westenberger embraces these neither-nor mix-ups by casting artificial materials into natural forms and deploying natural outdoor materials in her interior spaces. The artist decorates the gallery with coal-black sand, as well as generous deposits of powdery rose-petal dust that fill the display with the flower’s scent.
Westenberger’s rose-colored palette and dainty furnishings read traditionally feminine, but for every lilting gesture and voluptuous form, there are edges and spiky points. The show is centered on two mostly identical portrait sculptures — “Soft Echos I” and “Soft Echos II” — that face each other from walls on either side of the gallery. Each includes a woman’s face, various hands and feet, forms that allude to internal organs, strings of pearls and seashells. The composition is lashed together with textured elements that look like woven ropes, but also morph into thorny vines and the tentacles of some unseen marine menace. Both pieces are cast in resin, decorated with silver leaf and hung on walls where they resemble ornate mirror frames.
I attended the show’s opening on Nov. 1, and realized afterward that I’d misremembered this particular piece — I could have sworn that the sculptures had reflective centers, but the pair only offers symbolic windows into each other’s psychophysical interiority. The pearls are nautical images that speak to watery emotional states, but they’re also symbols of status and generational wealth. The ropes, vines and tentacles are attention tangled, pulled and split between thoughts and feelings, dreams and worldly physical being.
“The Lull of Sharp Sugar” is a silvery birdbath form that’s been filled with rose-petal dust in the middle of the gallery. It’s surrounded by a beach of rose-petal dust that creates a teardrop shape on the floor around the sculpture. The fountain-like form has pointed edges that throw crown-shaped shadows on the purple dust beneath the gallery lights.
The ceremonial font, regal-colored powders and ornate wall decorations give Our Shadows, Spilling Together the feel of a ritualized space. The scent of rose petals fills the air, and mirrors face each other over a reflecting pool. The installation feels more ancient Greek than witchy, and I’d argue the work serves an oracular function in its capacity for generating multilayered narratives through the poetic use of symbolic imagery.
The best thing about Our Shadows, Spilling Together is the myriad perspectives it invites. The work speaks to personal psychology as well as cultural folklore, and Westenberger weighs her thematic and narrative compositions as delicately as she considers her surfaces and materials. Something frilly and floral becomes armored and weaponized. A material connects to a constellation that inspired a myth.
Our Shadows, Spilling Together is a multifaceted activation with rigorous integrity across its concepts and forms. It’s an immersive, multimedia story space that spans everything from personal perspectives to universal themes.
