Shara Mays: Losing Sight of It

The Pit is pleased to present Losing Sight of It, a presentation of new works by Colombia-based artist Shara Mays, her first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from January 25 until March 1, 2025. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, January 25th from 5-7 pm. 

In our day-to-day lives, we depend on color to quickly delineate the visible world. Color serves to instruct, categorize, and differentiate. We’re taught to view colors as distinctive and definable. Red means stop, and green means go. 

Shara Mays’s lilting abstractions liberate color from its usual utility and fixidity. Tracts of aquamarine dissolve into cerulean dabs only to be tinged with mauve and overrun with a flourish of carmine. Shades shimmer, dissolve, congeal, and alight across dappled staccato patterns, patches of scumble and sgraffito, and shapes unmoored from signification. Here, color is fluid, changeable, evanescent, not captured, or reduced to the lowest common tone. 

To approach the large, all-encompassing paintings from a distance is to watch them transform with each step. The suggestion of a lavish landscape is replaced by a kaleidoscopic field of quivering chromatic filaments. Meaning flashes in the space between part and whole. On the canvas, she renders the ecstatic feeling of being within nature—borrowing her primary palette from native flowers and plants—rather than simply representing nature itself. Subverting conventional hierarchies, the compositions privilege intuition over analysis, the elusive over the concrete. Irresolution asserts the need for imaginative engagement, making it all the more difficult to pull yourself away. 

Mays's singular use of color not only confounds easy comprehension but disrupts arbitrary binaries. For the artist, exploring identity through vibrantly pigmented oil paints is an exploration of relationality, multiplicity, and the unknown. As a Black woman born and raised in the United States, she’s familiar with the way color is wielded as a constraining force—just as capable of obfuscation as revelation. Evincing the essential instability of color, she imagines shade after shade intensified, muted, and remade by the surrounding hues, exposing the universe within each individual pink and cornflower blue. These colors can’t be measured in absolutes but in degrees. Through the restless interplay of warm and cool, supersaturated and subdued, the compositions synthesize dissonance and engage the innumerable possibilities for complementarity and balance. 

The seven paintings in Losing Sight of It affect a more intimate, contemplative presence than her previous works. Rather than arresting emotional states, they imagine a multivalent interiority, not resolved or resigned, but lucid, prudent. Mays attributes this meditative and methodical approach to her recent move to Cartagena, Colombia, where people are more mindful of nature and one another and materials are difficult to come by. From the slower, recursive gestures, a physicalized poetics of lines and organic shapes emerges, connecting one canvas to the next through rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. 

Walking through the gallery, I experienced a striking sense of synesthesia: I could hear the paintings as well as see them. Yes, all of them seemed to be singing. From Palma de Coco, an aria so transcendent as to make my fingers tingle, my heart lift a little. Affirming the presence and significance of a world beyond red and green, black and white, Mays's paintings give rise to new colors in new light.—Tara Anne Dalbow  

I’m reminded then of the final lines in Sonia Sanchez’s oracular poem Morning Song and Evening Walk, “Aye-Aye-Aye Ayo-Ayo-Ayo Ayeee-Ayeee-Ayeee/ Amen men men men Awoman woman woman woman.”