The Brooklyn Rail

In her show I am not lost, just wandering at Sperone Westwater, Joana Choumali deepens her meditative practice of embroidering on photographs taken on her early morning walks through Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. Her compositions are set by her snapshots onto which the artist sews, so while being quilt-like, the pieces retain a lens perspective. People are caught in motion, and that little frisson of spontaneity is hard to get without a camera. These are some of the scenes: a man sits on a curb, head lowered; a group walks together down a path among bright foliage; a man, face obscured by the child in his arms, bends his knees under her weight; a woman on her side faces the beach at sunset. These portraits do not respect traditional boundaries of self and environment; the figures are redolent and the environments are alive.

In addition to her neat, even stitches, Choumali layers fine net fabrics that obscure the photographs; skies are not only the sky of the snapshot, but also layer upon layer of blue, pink, gold, white, and glittering net. The sky in WHO’S PEACE IS IT KEEPING? (2024), a triptych, is built like this. Below that sky, trees are similarly composite: photograph, embroidery of branch, contrasting stitches of leaf, textured thread of trunk, and more net. In sky and in flora, the mixture of seeing a real photographed thing mixes with the recognition of seeing a drawn thing, which reflexively maps back on the real. Everything is an instance of the thing and simultaneously the original thing. In an interview in the New York Times, Choumali said, “It’s important for me to be in between the reality of the picture and the dream of my imagination,” and perhaps this double being of the images comes from the betweenness she maintains. Each of the six works in the first room were snapped during sunrise, presumably; each at different moments of that never-static spectacle. But under Choumali’s hand, they also become the dream, the archetype, the ur-Sunrise. After all, we go out to watch the “sunrise,” we never admit we are going out to watch “one of the sunrises.” The images have this reverence. Choumali memorializes these ephemeral moments with her net, paint, and embroidery, but this process simultaneously enacts the loss of the same moment. There’s melancholy wrapped in the reification of image in textile.

Choumali’s figures are both less and more obscured. The artist always refuses to show the subject’s eyes, again reverentially: a two veils of hair over twinning girls in I AM US (2024), embroidered floral patterns rising like songs from the mouth of the woman in THE RAIN IS GONE (2024) or with golden laurels in many works. I found myself searching for the eyes of each figure, as if meeting their eyes could stabilize the type of experience I was having. Denied this easy connection, I sought it elsewhere. This slows down the viewing process, the image unfolds almost shyly, and reveals the minds and psychology of the figures expressed in their whole bodies, glowing luminously black and brown in otherwise pastel scenes.

In almost half of the images, the figures are seen from behind. In some ways, this created a universal-experience vibe, meaning that in IF WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DANCE, WHY ALL THIS MUSIC?, I could have been joining a woman in her of transcendent joy; in EVEN A STORM CAN’T BREAK IT I was brought into the deep thrill of friendship, ocean, night. But these are also lonely images, yearning images, reminding one of the irreducible distance between one human experience and the next.