#chiaroscuro

#chiaroscuro

Water, for Rawles, is never neutral. In the lineage of scholars like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the artist considers water to be a charged site and vessel for memory. Along with references to texts by Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Albert Camus, among others, she presents this philosophical grounding as a way to consider the inevitability of change and how transformation can inspire hope. "What is the artist's role in moments of crisis?" she asks.

In a dark library lit by a single lamp, four men, a young woman and three children crowd around a circular dais. They are staring at a clockwork contraption called an orrery, housed within giant bands of metal that suggest a celestial sphere. Below, tiny planets rotate around the Sun, orbited by pearl moons. Concentric plates allow the planets to move according to their relative speeds.