Much of our ability to see ordinary material objects depends crucially on our ability to see their shadows—both those that they cast, and those that are cast upon them. But what, if anything, are shadows? Are they presences or absences? Do they have colors, or are they only variations of black and gray? In Light of Shade, on view at Fergus McCaffrey’s New York gallery from February 27 to April 19, 2019, brings together a group of seven women who mine and explore the areas of indeterminacy between representation and abstraction, vision and blindness, light and shade. Together, the works on view provide moments of fleeting relief from the pressure to represent the world as it is, instead delving into mundane phenomena that might otherwise escape our attention: desaturated shadows on a wall, sunspots that appear on the floor in mid-afternoon, flecks of dust in a ray of summer light. So, too, do these images embrace moments of non-knowing, obscured areas of darkness in which representational space disappears and the imagination takes over.
