Danielle Kehler on Narda Ray’s Imago
There are two types of liminal spaces common in society where you’ll find a particular stillness lies, and sound is muffled and obtrusive. These are places of worship and the art gallery. Perhaps our collective unconscious still relates the two, as temples and churches often served as the earliest and grandest collections. Imago, the 2024 Marion Nicoll Gallery exhibition of sculpture and drawing by multidisciplinary artist Narda Ray, feels particularly suited for this sort of recollection as it examines the impact of religious ideology on the formation of the self, as well as what it takes to reject the limitations imposed by growing up female in an impossibly rigid culture.
An altar adorned with rusted nails and railway spikes, a child-sized schooldesk upon which sits an old CRT television looping a video performance involving a puppet child, and sculptures made of illustrated bibles and paper pulp are arranged within the gallery, the space dominated by a large amorphous shape resembling the outline of a cocoon. The imagery is direct and could, in less sensitive work, feel blunt to the point of parody but is handled with a delicate tact. There's an existential horror at the heart of Imago, the dread of being trapped in a cycle you are helpless to change, that the ideas which forced you into the chrysalis not of your own making are too deeply ingrained to be discarded. The materials are cleverly used to speak to this, nails carrying particularly significant Christian symbolism while their practical use as a tool for building is eaten away by rust. Forms comprised of pulped bible pages, the building blocks of the artist’s own indoctrination, reduced to a base component and reimagined for creation. Using building tools that are no longer suitable, paper and old pain, Ray gives these materials salvation.
One particularly interesting piece is ‘To Lynn Whom I Love, By Randy’, 2022. This work, sitting innocuously on a plinth in the left back corner of the gallery, is dense with information. The sculpture is a transformed NIV women’s devotional bible, covered with selected passages from the hollowed tome that emphasise a woman’s subservience and lack of agency, her need to be evaluated and chastised. This is presented as a gift of love for a person, a partner, but is a manual of how to be worthy of that love, resolute that love is neither freely given nor should be expected. Nestled inside are two romantic tokens under the gentle cage of delicate ribbon corset lacing. A flower fashioned from a rusty nail and pulped paper lays next to a detached woman's finger that is handcuffed around the stump, trailing off to an empty cuff. It had been necessary to amputate, to leave a pound of flesh, as the cuffs, once closed, would never be opened for this woman, any woman. It is hope, deceit, and disappointment in a pretty package.
As the institution of religion has been often used to justify the banning and destruction of seditious or dangerous books, the comedy inherent in the fact that the moveable printing press used to so widely proliferate the Christian bible is also responsible for the education of the masses that allowed the broad development of critical thinking has never been lost on me. Indeed, one of the identifiers of a cult or high-control religion is the restriction of access to information, a feat much easier to achieve before the modern book. The use of bookmaking methods in many of Imago's works, and especially in one particular piece ‘A bible for girls’, 2022, exemplifies why this aspect is notable. The work is spread over 26 small collages on bright pink handmade paper. Each of these uses a letter of the alphabet to deliver edicts regarding a woman's place in society as demonstrated by biblical teachings. “A is for Assured in the Lord”, and so forth. This is how indoctrination works, by directly rooting the foundational education of children in the concepts of obedience and gendered expectation, making it harder to untangle one's own mind from such concepts. When “O is for obey”, it is a stretch of the imagination indeed that it could also be for onward.
What is an imagination for though, if not to stretch into strange new shapes? The hope of change lies in the pieces Reliquary 2021, and Logos 2022. Both titled after words I had to look up, these sculptures present the idea that however difficult or deeply ingrained the chains are in a mind or even a culture, the way to become the imago, the fully formed version of yourself is to choose. In Reliquary the ideas that are no longer useful, that are rusting and rotted are enshrined and left behind, honoured but abandoned. Logos is natural form and evident hand-making, an encapsulation that is nonetheless open and full of light.
While interrogating the role and responsibilities of religion in society is not a new concept in art, it is often made in conjunction with statements that are seen or imagined as both sweeping and inflammatory. Imago resists this, presenting a more intimate exploration for debate. Ray does not rely on shock imagery, focusing on intensely personal relics of childhood. There is pain here, a quiet sort of tragedy witnessing the aftermath of self-actualisation in the face of a powerful outside influence. What came most readily to mind was the idea of a landslide survivor picking through the wreckage patiently, salvaging what is worth salvaging then casting bricks from the very soil that caused the damage. Is the earth to blame? The rain that saturated the dirt? The tree roots that could no longer hold the weight? Destruction for destruction’s sake can be viewed as society’s most intolerable expression of evil, but destruction for creation's sake? That’s art. That’s Imago.
Danielle Kehler is a sculptor and traditional Cree beader currently living and working in Calgary, on Treaty 7 territory. Her artistic practice explores the intersection of technology, Indigenous identity and the concept of causality. She graduated from AU Arts in 2022 with a BA in Sculpture and has collaborated with the city of Calgary to create several public works which use technological tools to display intimately created beaded art in an accessible public setting. Kehler’s work aims to acknowledge history while placing traditional Indigenous craft in the contemporary art conversation.
Email: dkehlerart@proton.me
IG: @redironarts
Visit the archive page for Narda Ray’s Imago here: Narda Ray - Imago