CCS BARD

Artists: Azadeh Elmizadeh, Ella Gonzales, Lotus L. Kang, Audie Murray

What potential can be found in blurriness, fuzziness, and layering? In the context of a hyper-visible, high-definition world, this exhibition presents works by Azadeh Elmizadeh, Ella Gonzales, Lotus L. Kang, and Audie Murray, whose material strategies of obscuring are used to produce excessive imaginative potential. The artists’ invitation to engage works on multiple registers is set against a backdrop of increasingly hyper-clear resolution, available on a mass scale. Interrupting this moment of constant apparent clarity—by manipulating light, layering paint, or folding fabrics—the artists explore and complicate the politics of seeing and being seen.

Through blurring, folding, and concealing, tensions—visual, material, conceptual—arise between what is revealed and what is not. Whether through the folds of a tatami mat or shifting associations attached to cast-aluminum anchovies, Kang represents identity as multiple and modular. Elmizadeh pulls from literary references, lived experience, and her native language, Farsi, using layering, rubbing, and burnishing to point to the impossibility of direct translation. Murray’s wall drawing and performance, created with many materials including charcoal and animal grease, both trace and obscure her self in space. Gonzales challenges perception with her superimposed renderings of familial spaces—either suspended and fully visible, or folded and held within wooden supports resembling furniture. The exhibition’s title borrows from “Mailbox,” a poem originally written in Korean by Kim Hyesoon—a poet referenced in Kang’s work—and translated by Don Mee Choi, which explores identity and how we define it as it shifts and changes over time.

What does it mean to bear witness with obscured sight? What does it mean to perform without an audience? In a contemporary art world charged with debate around identity and its role in art-making, both ends of the argument point to a shared conclusion: visibility does not always equate to direct social change or comprehensive understanding. Acting as both refusals and invitations, these artists’ works approach the threshold of visibility without ever becoming fully clear or knowable, ultimately proposing the generative potential of the blur.

a clear veil is supported by The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator.