REVIEW: Pooja Pittie: “Only in Dark the Light” at McCormick Gallery

Pooja Pittie  (b. 1977), Only in Dark the Light, 2024. Acrylic on canvas; 54 x 54 in. Photo © Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of McCormick Gallery.

REVIEW
Pooja Pittie: Only in Dark the Light
McCormick Gallery
835 W Washington Blvd
Chicago, IL 60607
March 21–May 10, 2024

By Lori O’Dea

Only in Dark the Light is Pooja Pittie’s third solo exhibition at McCormick Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2016. The seven paintings and three fiber art installations on view were made in 2023 and 2024. The paintings build upon yet depart from the artist’s previous work, while the fiber art carries her evocative abstraction, exuberant color, and irregular lines into a new medium.

My first impression of the show was formed on the sidewalk. Two intriguing works—Nowhere to Hide and Be in Softness—were on view through the windows. Nowhere to Hide is a 40-inch square of colors laid in rhythmic, choppy strips. I misperceived it as collage, but once in the gallery, saw that it was canvas painted with acrylics—greens, yellows, reds, and blues washed the surface like watercolors. What I had seen as collage were actually wavering lines in the foreground that appeared to segment the color-washed background into strips.

Huddled atop a long white table is Be in Softness, an assemblage of 240 petite and charmingly multicolored hand-knitted vessels. The colors, the multitude, the crochet brought to mind Mike Kelley’s 1987 tapestry, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, made from second-hand stuffed toys and crocheted remnants. The similarity fell apart on tone: Kelley’s work provokes thoughts of family discord, love and guilt, while Pittie’s evokes feelings of calm and acceptance. Each cylindrical vessel has a knitted top of, mostly, a different color.

Pooja Pittie  (b. 1977), Detail of Be in Softness, 2024. Hand-knitted and crocheted vessels, mixed fibers, hidden notes written by the artist to herself (hopes, inspirations, fears, self-doubt); dimensions variable. Photo © Ellen Moses.

Collectively, the vessels use all the colors—earthy, vibrant, glowing—imaginable for a beloved scarf: from emerald to olive, butter to bubblegum, tangerine to aubergine. While Kelley’s piece raises uneasy thoughts, Pittie’s work soothes. Each vessel, we read, contains “hidden notes written by the artist to herself.” Where the weave is looser, we can peer through the looping threads and see the paper notes within.

At a gallery talk on May 2, curator and scholar Erica Warren engaged the artist in discussion of her background and her new work. Pooja Pittie was born in India and came to Chicago to pursue an MBA and a career in accounting. Seeking balance, she revived the passion of her youth, initiating a 20-minute daily drawing session. This took root and flourished. Eventually, Pittie found expression—and a new career path—in acrylic paint.

Like the artist’s earlier paintings, the canvases in Only in Dark the Light are abstract and wildly colorful. They depart from earlier works in scale, use of line, and painted out, or vignetted, edges. The scale is a constraint that Pittie, who has been living with progressive muscular dystrophy, has accepted in recent years, limiting her canvases to heights she can reach from her wheelchair.

Effort is evident in the imperfect, roughly horizontal lines that are a primary element of the paintings; painted across the entire canvas, lines structure the foreground. These are not the hard-edged stripes of a color-field painter. Nor are they the hypnotically concentrated stripes in works by Agnes Martin. Pittie’s abstract stripes move unsteadily across the canvas, covering the distance. We can see through them; they reveal depth, opening up into spaces awash with color.

Artist Pooja Pittie (left) discussed her life and work with curator and scholar Erica Warren at McCormick Gallery on May 2, 2024. Photo © Ellen Moses.

Several paintings in the show read as one color, but none are monochromatic. I Thought I’d Find You Here, an orange painting, is actually multicolored: starring orange, but worked through with yellow, pink, red, and green. In Under the Red Moon, blood red, painted in from the edges, softens the frame, centering the painting, and drawing the eye to the fresh, bright reds in the middle, which are contoured by marks of white, orange, and green.

At the center of the painting Only in Dark the Light, behind dark blue stripes, space opens onto sky blue and white. Below are purple masses. Orange and red marks highlight the horizontal stripes, sparingly in the open space, more densely over the purple mass, creating rhythmic movement between the foreground stripes and the background wash of colors, areas of openness and density, dimensional space we can see into.

Fiber art is a newer medium for Pittie, who discovered that knitting, weaving, and stitching are less taxing and let her continue her practice at times when painting canvas is too arduous. Waiting (A Self-Portrait) stands five feet tall. Forty-six hand-knitted ropes cascade through a freestanding metal grid as if over a person’s shoulders. Each rope is tightly knitted but unraveling at the ends. Colors abound—pinks, purples, blues, greens, grays—and numbers matter: each rope represents a year of the artist’s life and is approximately her height.

New paintings and fiber art by Pooja Pittie on view in McCormick Gallery. Photo © Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of McCormick Gallery.

Unforgotten comprises three floating shelves arrayed with nineteen hand-knitted and crocheted objects. The forms are two: vessels and solids, which could be called bundles. All are palm-sized, expressively stitched or bound. We see delicate open loops, dense weaves, tidiness, messiness, collapsing walls, stuffing, and binding. A close look at one complex bundle, threads wrapped around threads in a form exemplified by Sheila Hicks, reveals depths beyond the surface, ledges, crevasses, miniature space to explore.

Those who missed Pooja Pittie’s show at McCormick Gallery have another opportunity to see her abstract, evocative work in the exhibition “What Is Seen and Unseen: Mapping South Asian American Art in Chicago,” at the South Asia Institute through October 26, 2024.

Lori O’Dea is a writer, reviewer, and editor living in Chicago. Her portfolio can be found at loriodea.com.

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