Marisa Takal
Pathfinders
April 19, 2025–June 7, 2025
Reception: Saturday April 19, 6–9pm
Marisa Takal’s exhibition of new work, Pathfinders, stages nine painted doors in concert with one another. The doors explode with hallucinatory color: lush hues skate across their surfaces in configurations ranging from fractal, to liquid, to luminous. Each door bursts with its own uniquely auric energetic imprint. Are these images the surfaces of the doors, or their substance? What is inside, and what is outside? Pathfinders troubles these distinctions, presenting doors as complex entities in their own right rather than utilitarian devices.
Doors can be locked, limiting the possibility of passage. They can be left open, offering an invitation to enter. They can enclose and entrap us, delimiting our movement and freedom. Doors can create the illusion of privacy, a decorative mark of luxury or opulence. Whatever the door, separation is implicit – between interior and exterior, public and private, between free and captive, life and death.
The twentieth century saw the mass production of doors as a means of both separation and security – in the postwar suburban home, but also in the prison, the asylum, and the hospital. Pathfinders recontextualizes this era of standardization. Hung side by side, the doors are liberated from the labor of shutting, locking, and trapping. Both sides are visible and vibrant. The distinction between inside and outside is moot. No longer instrumentalized towards the work of securitization or partition, Takal’s doors hang together in affective harmony.
If these doors were once closed, Takal’s emanations have picked the locks, setting dynamite to their mechanisms of enclosure. To put words to these doors both reduces and confines them. I imagine each door as a person, unhinged and rehung, finally together in one room.
—Cyrus Dunham, April 2025.
Takal (b. 1991, Montclair, New Jersey) received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. She has shown in numerous solo, duo, and group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, La Jolla; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; White Columns, New York; Page Gallery, New York; Company Gallery, New York; Venus Over Manhattan, New York; Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica; Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; Nicodim Gallery, New York; Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River; Jeffrey Stark, New York; and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm. In 2016, she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Stanley Hollander Award.