“Critics’ Picks” by Dan Jakubowski
Artforum
Afruz Amighi’s “shadowpieces” are dichotomous structures, aphotic and heavy while ethereal and effused with a gentle light. Constructed of elegant steel frameworks, they hang from the ceiling or emerge from the floor, creating dramatic shadow plays. Exhibited in darkened gallery spaces, works such as We Wear Chains, 2018, transform the rooms into cathedral-like vaults of warm luminosity and silent gloom. The sculpture, which confronts the viewer at the beginning of the show and immediately compels a reverential quietude, melds disparate sources such as ancient Greek vase painting, traditional African sculpture, and American antebellum silhouette prints into a chaotic panorama of hybrid figures that are at once angelic and demonic. Wearing crowns and pierced by arrows, these sinuous chimeras dance—or writhe—beneath a tumultuous sky, a glow casting umbral doppelgängers on the wall behind.