Tau Lewis: Spirit Level

“I wanted the figures in Spirit Level to be architectural. They are meant to be broad, strong and tall, something that is resisting like a castle or a giant tree or even a mountain. A figure that could also be a fortress or a place to hide inside of, that is how I always think of angels.”

—Tau Lewis

“Through the pris­matic lens of the world of evocative associations she gathers, Lewis’s work is directed at healing personal, collective, and historical traumas through the repetitive forms of creative labor and patterns of reuse she employs.”

—Jeffrey De Blois, curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

“Something about the scale of [the] pieces was incredibly moving and very engaging for viewers—there was almost this invitation to talk to them.... We’re at a point in which the distinction between art and craft doesn’t matter anymore.”

—Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 59th Venice Biennale, in The New York Times

“As many of the fragment’s histories are unknown, they fuse to create a new manner of storytelling that is not dependent on complete knowability, and yet, they possess familiar elements that prompt our patterns of recollection and memory. Lewis turns canonized narrative structure inside out, literally and figuratively reimagining how we can engage with the past.”

—Magdalyn Asimakis, curator and writer

“We don’t all claim to be making sacrifices to our ancestors, but in a sense, that’s what I felt about her works…. [Now she is] tearing things to pieces, just tearing them to pieces, putting them back together, looking at them in a different format than they would ever be looked at.”

—Lonnie Holley, artist

“Tau Lewis’s works seem to evolve from the inside out. It is true that some hold secrets within—buried objects of personal significance that remain unseen on the surface, yet one might sense that they are there—beneath the hollow chest, or behind the painted eyes.”

—Margot Norton, chief curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive