“As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure subject is an inquiry of our potential to know the world around us and our actively being in it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic.”

Since the early 90s, Kira Lynn Harris has been absorbed in the exploration of light and space. In that time, most of her work, like that of her influences (and fellow California natives) Robert Irwin and James Turrell, has taken the form of mixed media and sculptural installation. Often using Mylar as a reflective device or focusing on abstracted bands of light in her photographs, Harris has left the door of interpretation open to her viewers, focusing more on the sensations of perception created by her deftly composed images. While the emphasis on light and its ability to trigger emotion and mood are at the core of her endeavor, Harris’ perception-altering installation work forced us to reconsider our bodies in space and within ‘the hidden structures of art.’ Continuing the focus on our perceptions, desires and curiosities for the world around us, Harris’ newest work, while becoming more representational in their rendering of the phenomenological aspects of light and space, is also perhaps her most direct route to explore her essential interests.

In these new photographs, light is no longer abstracted to a minimalist mass but drawn out in a way that provides the viewer with a direct gaze into a compositional space full of wonder and unspoken narratives. This delineation of perspective puts us in a place reminiscent of Sartre’s conception of the gaze (the watcher) with a nebulous though definitively present narrative. Harris’ new work is likewise more poignantly theatrical, shedding some of the trappings of minimalism. There are tangible forms for our eyes to decipher and a network of meaning triggered by signifiers: a row of church pews, a luminescent divan in front of a country house’s window or a lamp sitting on a bedside table. What goes on here? Who goes there? And, what happens or happened? These are all questions that become integral to our viewing experience in front of the work, all taken while in residence at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, upstate New York. While these photographs suggest the artist’s continued exploration of light and space, she acknowledges the more conceptual aspects of her new work (the highly evident charge of psychological content) in the title of the photograph Eva Slept Here, a winking nod to the humanized minimalism of Eva Hesse, one of Harris’ artistic heroes. In addition to Hesse, it is useful to take into account the work of Martin Puryear and Isamu Noguchi, two other artists, who have not only had an impact on Harris’ work but all of them have created significant bodies of work in Woodstock.

While open to interpretation, these spaces are darkly lit, a little spooky and of course, the evidence of things not seen. While light has often been used to evoke spirituality, a facet of Harris’ older work, here the effect is taken one step further. Photographs of church pews are joined by a single irreverent image of a cross in Harlem. The allusion to the city streets is a far cry from the countryside where most of the images were taken. But likewise it is an indelible image that puts us in the real world. All in all, in Harris’ work, we have a strange new place to go, where your imagination takes you from there is completely up to you.