CALIDA RAWLES

In This Time Before Tomorrow, there are no identifiable figures and time does not travel in one direction. Broken, disjointed, murky, upside-down bodies represent the feeling of being knocked off one’s axis, and hyperrealist representation dissolves into fabulism. The paintings picture the liquid and solid contours of the ‘in-between,’ muddying the boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary by enfolding fantastical, supernatural elements into everyday life. Where and how do we locate ourselves and each other in times of unease and upheaval? What are the consequences of totalising neglect and frenzy? How much is too much? Rawles answers these questions with play and speculation. Her new works dive more deeply into colour theory, asserting her expertise as a colourist; her experiments with both colour and chiaroscuro define the buoyancy and stagnation that imbibe the bodies that float, sink, and fold into one another. Strong contrasts of dark and light color, largely within a tertiary palette, create atmospheric volume, depth, and drama. Gestural brushstrokes and depictions of movement mirror states of matter as well as liquid and solid states of being. Blurring the line between hyperrealist figuration and surrealist abstraction, the darkness of the palette personifies the weight of the present while the veil of the water becomes a prism and conduit for other worlds and galaxies.

Reference images of fire, lungs, a Bodhi tree, a living snake plant, and other natural elements inform the artist’s conceptual and formal thinking. In All is One, twin subjects turn inward to face each other at the center of the canvas. Rather than a mirror image, the two sides fuse into one another. The artist’s daughter served as the model for the painting, and resemblance—twin subjects, likeness, similitude, generational transfer, and the past facing the present—forms its core. All four elements are present—fire, earth, water, air—gesturing toward balance. And yet, this is not a picture of symmetry. The subject on the right is slightly higher than its twin, while two otherworldly bubbles draw the eye into another space and time punctuated by flames, lung tissue, tree branches, and shadows.

Abstraction and figuration blend and blur, just as the flesh of Rawles’ subjects diffuse into each other and into aquatic expanses of primordial liquid. Aspects from philosophy texts, speculative fiction novels, ancient and indigenous mythologies, and Black feminist poetry collections and memoirs she read while preparing for the show—including the texts The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Survival Is a Promise, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Alchemist—are also present. What is the artist’s role in moments of crisis? In When Time Carries, the certainty of time, location, and direction dissolve. Clarity and resolution give way to intermission and surrender as her subject appears to submit to water’s ability to hold, carry, and resist. Is the body floating or drowning? Ripples and bubbles obscure the figure’s face, camouflaging and hiding its identity and actions as it interacts with and is changed by its environment.

Bubbles, shadows, and stars recur in This Time Before Tomorrow as symbols of energy’s transformative potential. Both bubbles and stars are composed of gas. The result of nuclear fusion, air bubbles in this new suite of paintings double as stars and planets on the brink of transformation—an alternate state of matter and being. Once fully formed, a star releases excess fuel to create new stars. Here, stored energy and exhaustion become life forces that catalyse new entities constituted by movement, energy renewal, and subject-object relations that meet disequilibrium and disorientation with lightness and effervescence. Asymmetrical bodies of flesh, water, and gas become ciphers for power, weariness, and hope, while natural elements and processes accumulate energy waiting to be released and recycled.

Beyond water’s function as a vital force and historically charged site of memory, Rawles’ choices in colour and pose, as well as how she renders space and the environment, are connected to broader questions of race, representation, and ethics within art history and everyday life. Each artwork is based on a photograph or series of photographs that the artist takes herself, and the tertiary colours of her palate signify the liminal space of transformation and existential angst that her figures tread. This alchemical focus on change, disillusionment, and the potential for renewal in This Time Before Tomorrow is a blueprint for the future. Reflection thus emerges not only as a surface element but also as a character in its own right and a method of making. At a time when chaos of all types—political, economic, environmental—proliferates, Rawles’ new paintings prompt viewers to embrace the threshold between past and present as well as the feeling of being in transition. What results is a vibrant wellspring for inner and outer worldmaking.