Shut your eyes. Shut them tight.
Tighter still.
Calethia DeConto, Shakti Rising II, 2018, Cyanotype and acrylic on paper | Image courtesy of the artist
What do you see? Colors? Shapes? Craggy lightning strikes? Press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets; do those colors and shapes and lightning strikes intensify? Can you witness the whole prehistoric pattern of light right there in your own little atrium? Do these colors and shapes transport you? How do they make you feel?
I see lightning, interplanetary weather, in great, electric purples and greens and blues. So extraordinary are these colors that I can feel the ionization of the air, hear the crack of thunder, and smell the atmosphere around me. The experience is replicated in Calethia DeConto’s work, which is simultaneously supernatural and witchy, mysterious and emotionally charged. DeConto’s work lives in instantaneity, the shifts of mood from one to the next, in love with each iteration of the self. She claims that her work “whispers”, but I hear it shout. I feel the longing, the profundity of the journey on which each of our souls as human beings embark every day in DeConto’s graceful mix of photography with cyanotype and acrylic paint. Magic lives there, and with the barest of gestures, the most simplistic representation of the human form, and the sparest of palettes, Calethia DeConto captures that ever present magic with unparalleled sensitivity and conviction. Her piece, Her World, is my pick of the week.
Calethia DeConto, Holding her Ground, 2019 | Photograph and acrylic paint