New Mexico is the only place where I’ve specifically chosen to live. When I first came here, I was struck by the similarities between North African and Native American patterns in weaving and jewelry, not to mention the adobe architecture, the mountains and open skies. It felt very much like home.
Featuring over 40 paintings, sculpture, drawings, and lithographs, Mokha Laget: Perceptualism surveys the last ten years of an artistic practice devoted to exploring perception and space. Through a playful and illusionistic use of color and implied dimensionality, Laget’s work references her multicultural influences, particularly the unique landscape and architecture of the places where she has lived, ranging from Northern Africa through Washington, DC to her current home in Santa Fe. The stunning shaped canvases for which Laget is best known celebrate abstraction’s capacity to respond to the complexities and ambiguities of contemporary life; the work’s visual hybridity manifests as “gentle” optical chaos. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that considers Laget’s work as well as her contributions to the Washington, DC art community of the 1980s and ‘90s. The publication includes a dialogue between Laget and Lucy Lippard, and essays by David Pagel and exhibition curator Kristen Hileman.