Esther Pearl Watson at Morena di Luna
Angels and aliens, saints and spaceships converge upon Morena di Luna this summer season, blurring the excellence between divinity and conspiracy, creativeness and perception. In a constellation of pencil-and-foil works on paper, the German-born, Texas-raised artist Esther Pearl Watson envisions celestial heralds and alien craft hovering over fields and farmlands, every sheet inscribed with effusive, esoteric titles, corresponding to Their fountain of vitality is nuclear fusion and An abundance of oort clouds exist within the galaxy (all works cited, 2022). The naïve folks type of her work on board, paper, panel, and canvas recall devotional Mexican ex-votos of their depictions of youngsters taking part in and selecting flowers, oblivious to the scintillating spirits and UFOs overhead; in addition to the obsessive spaceship work of Romanian “outsider” artist Ionel Talpazan. Watson’s otherworldly imagery is, nonetheless, most instantly influenced by recollections of her father, who has spent a lot of his life trying to construct and promote spacecraft to NASA.
À la Surrealist assemblage—Eileen Agar’s 1936 Angel of Anarchy involves thoughts—Watson has additionally contrived “meteorites” of stone and earthenware accessorized with glitter, grime, silver leaf, feathers, and sequins, housing them within the gallery’s built-in cupboards alongside discovered images of snowy scenes and landscapes doctored with miniature foil UFOs. Watson’s enigmatic upcycling is most completed within the titular set up, An Obvious Brightness, which mixes nightclub disco balls and dumpster-scavenged mirrors into an ad-hoc pavilion bedizened with eccentric pink materials, furs, and piñatas. The work’s dedication to materials radiance refers again to its title, an astronomical time period for the luminosity of a star as seen from Earth.
— Philomena Epps
