IN REVIEW: Marianne Hall’s ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ a window into the unknown

Before moving to New Mexico, I had never experienced virga, or disappearing rain, a meteorological phenomenon that’s quite common in deserts. Essentially, because our humidity is so low, the rain vaporizes before it touches the ground, creating thin wispy tendrils that are often compared to jellyfish tentacles.

For the fabric installation, “Between Heaven and Earth,” in the Window Box at Vladem Contemporary, artist Marianne Hall sculpts virga out of shimmery pink organza (clouds) and long strands of pink thread (rain). If Hall had presented “Between Heaven and Earth” on a flat matte background, the thread would simply look like thread. Because she has lined the entire window box in gold leaf, the fuzzy reflections create an illusion of depth, and the luminosity of the gold softens the thread’s physical presence. The result is a half-dematerialized object that comes in and out of focus as individual threads catch the light before being reabsorbed into the background.

I’m always impressed by artists who challenge themselves to represent seemingly unrepresentable things. Wispy tendrils of disappearing rain might be easy enough to paint, but to sculpt? That takes guts — and a lot of ingenuity.

Weather is among the most difficult things to depict three-dimensionally. The artist Ana María Hernando uses tulle to create large outdoor sculptures that look like clouds, and Berndnaut Smilde makes actual artificial clouds out of water vapor. As great as Smilde’s clouds are, though, they are reproductions, not representations. The work of Hernando and Hall is more interesting to me, precisely because of the material difference between the fabric they use and the weather phenomena they’re representing, which creates an unresolvable tension in the work. It’s a tension I also experience in the “Waterfall” paintings of Pat Steir, an artistic giant who died on Wednesday at the age of 87. We can view Steir’s paintings as illusionistic waterfalls, or we can view them for what they really are: unmixed paint poured onto canvases. They are both things at once: illusion and anti-illusion. Steir takes us elsewhere, then brings us right back to where we are. And that’s what Hall does, too. Her work conjures an ethereal otherness but remains grounded in its own materiality.

As the title suggests, “Between Heaven and Earth” is not simply a representation of weather but a meditation on life and death. Hall has been studying the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo, an intermediary afterlife state, similar to purgatory in Catholicism, where recently departed souls have the opportunity to purify themselves to achieve a more desirable rebirth. Some Buddhists view life itself as a bardo. If life is nothing but ceaseless change, as most Buddhists believe, then every moment of life is a moment of transition. “Between Heaven and Earth” provides a visual analogue for the experience of existential transitoriness, of being suspended between one state and another: earth and sky, life and death, being and nonbeing, or — for the artwork itself — reality and its representation.

Hall’s installation is visible all night, every night, in the window box near the entrance to the Vladem, and you don’t need a ticket to see it. So, if you find yourself, in the course of your bardo journey, wandering around in Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District late at night, check it out. It will remain on view through June 28.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.