Harper’s is pleased to announce Observer Effect, New York-based artist Lumin Wakoa’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new oil paintings by Wakoa and opens Thursday, April 4, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Lumin Wakoa traditionally paints en plein air to capture the ephemeral processes that inform lived experience. In the natural world, landscapes exist in a perpetual state of transformation: cycles of life, death, and evolution resound. For Wakoa, these environmental sequences of birth and decay are in direct dialogue with the emotional and psychic qualities that distinguish the human experience. Reacting to stimuli drawn from the natural world, Wakoa reveals the close proximity between human life and the organic ecosystems in which humanity takes refuge. The artist turns to painting as a vehicle of translation, transfiguring the innate intimacy between these two locales.
To render these interconnected manifestations of life, Wakoa immerses herself in the outdoors. The artist grew up along the Gulf Coast, an area teeming with biodiversity. Today, Wakoa often stages her towering canvases in front of the vegetation found in her yard in Queens. Other times, Wakoa hauls her materials to upstate New York, drawing from the lakes, rivers, and buzzing wildlife that permeate the region. Among these infinite ecosystems, life is never static. Foliage sprouts as quickly as it disintegrates. Leafage rapidly transitions in color as it undergoes the weathering of time and climate. Wakoa’s compositions, much like the mutable surroundings she studies, fluctuate frequently.
Within Observer Effect, Wakoa takes account of the relentless evolution of the natural world and the fickle metamorphosis of the self. Her expressive visual language, reflecting a marriage of aesthetic traditions including abstract expressionism and impressionism, responds to these rituals of transformation. The artist heeds her intuition as she choreographs each picture plane, sometimes flipping the canvas upside down as a balancing act to negotiate visual properties like color and dimensionality. With her invigorating use of hue and gestural mark-making, she depicts malleable scenes of life across Observer Effect—scenes that evade passive viewership as they teeter in and out of lucid sight.
Visually, we witness this distortion of reality and perception in works like Forget the stars, all you need is here on Earth—a scene of lush foilage that appears to dematerialize into hue and contrast. Here, the shape-shifting architecture of the wilderness is distilled into unruly forms that beckon abstraction: diverging swaths of yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds are arranged within conflicting sections amidst trailing sinuous green and violet strokes. These hues swirl into bulbous shapes that resemble flora as they overtake the blooming landscape. Blurring the frontier that divides figuration and abstraction, Wakoa applies the paint in a peripatetic manner. Meandering brushstrokes invite the viewer to wander along the dynamic visual plane, embodying the interior journey one might undergo across psychic and emotional space. Ultimately, it is through this sensorial looking and responding that Wakoa challenges the viewer. The onlooker is left to reckon with the mercurial spirit that can unite—and haunt—all living matter.
Lumin Wakoa (b. 1981, Ashland, TN) received a BFA from the University of Florida in 2005, and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. Her work has been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2023); Taymour Grahne, London (2023); Harper’s Apartment, New York (2022); Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland (2022); Deanna Evans Projects, Brooklyn (2021 and 2018); George Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); Present Company, Brooklyn (2017); and Providence College, Providence (2013). Most recently, Wakoa has participated in group exhibitions at Art SG, Singapore (2024); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2024); Almine Rech, online (2023); Frieze Seoul (2023); Harper’s, East Hampton and Los Angeles (2023, 2022, and 2021); Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome (2022); Hesse Flatow, New York (2021); and Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland (2021). Reviews of her work have appeared in Artnet, Brooklyn Rail, and Vogue, among other publications. Wakoa lives and works in New York City.