For her debut show with David Zwirner, Toronto-based artist Tau Lewis transformed the Los Angeles gallery into a sacral space animated by ancient auratic energy. Much like stepping into a temple, a hypnotic spiritual atmosphere envelops the viewer upon entry, elevating the experience of the show to the “Spirit Level” the exhibition’s title aptly describes. Monumental matriarchal totemic figures stand prominently in the space, gazing at visitors as if they were beings from another realm or manifestations of collective archetypal consciousness. Inspired by the grief of a recent loss, Lewis’ new sculptures summon an ancestral presence, reactivating ancient wisdom and emanating a spiritual aura as though they were shamans or deities who once participated in a mystical cosmogony.
“When I’m in a good place with my work and able to be fully present, my studio is also my spiritual home,” the artist tells Observer following the exhibition’s opening. “Because the work is more firmly rooted in the past due to the nature of the material, I reflect a lot on these histories and on time. I think about time as a medium. I wonder about ghosts and spirits and past lives. I try to be open to entering and communicating with the world of spirits.” She explains that our nervous systems are extraordinary, and there is far more to be experienced in the external world than science or logic can account for. “It starts with the materials, being deeply attuned to what comes out of them and following intuition.” The work in the show emerged naturally, led by the objects and what they suggested—some found long ago, some recently inherited and some she came across bearing messages that lingered.
A self-taught artist with a true world-building ability, Lewis’ practice unfolds through careful craftsmanship with materials that serve as conduits, embodying symbolic forms while revealing the hidden or forgotten meanings they carry from their origins or life journeys. “I like witnessing the process of things transforming. I like it when materials seem mysterious, so I love found things and old weathered things,” she says. “I’m sentimental and also coming to learn that I might be trying to figure something out about endings. Struggling with the thought of endings and goodbyes and finalities. Because really what I need is to see things beginning again; that’s where magic really happens in the work.”
For Lewis, a single object can spark an imaginative and creative journey—the wonder and mystery of something as simple as a key, shell or piece of glass is often enough to set her mind in motion. The form, she explains, is revealed by being already clothed in matter, even if the final image remains unknown, waiting for the moment of artistic epiphany. Like a puzzle piece, the object begins to attract others, and the rest slowly comes into view. “Things start to piece together like clues,” she says. “The more pieces I gather, the clearer the picture becomes—it’s intuitive, and the decision-making feels easy.”
She freely admits that because of the process’s mysterious and fundamentally random nature, each artwork can be challenging to make. Still, she experiences quiet delight seeing the puzzle pieces fall into place. “It feels like things are just passing through me to get where they are meant to be.” In the selection of remnants and relics, Lewis becomes a conduit, allowing them to settle—at least for now—into new, temporary forms.
Gently and emphatically engaging with the world around her, Lewis works with with fragments of old fabric, leather, rusted metal and found objects along with organic materials. In this exploration of new modes of coexistence and co-creation between human intention and natural elements, her guiding principle is the meanings, values and energies the materials already carry. “I’m drawn to objects that look like they want to speak or may have an interesting story. There’s not any specific approach to collecting things, although there are items that I never fail to find many of,” she says. “I usually scan the ground when I’m outside. I look down a lot. I think I just got used to picking things up over time.”
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In the past, she collected larger things—ironically, this was when she had a smaller studio. “I would like to start doing that again, but for now, I like small trinkets and metal pieces, stones and shells and things like that, basically anything that fits in a pocket or purse.” She gathers a small pile of organic and inorganic materials almost every day, and once back at the studio, she sorts them into bins. “I know where to go looking for certain things, like washers and hardware. I find it fun and relaxing.” Some of these objects transform into talismans and symbols conveying messages or even tiny portraits. “I mostly like that they take on a new form when combined, but they also are as they are. They are familiar, but I think by using the objects to create an image, I am obfuscating their meaning; sometimes they are hidden completely.”
At the moment, fabric and leather are among the recurring materials in Lewis’ studio—key ingredients in crafting her enigmatic and mystical masks and creatures. “They’re fun to play with because you can take it far with the transformation,” she says. “I have always found joy in utilizing scraps and offcuts because they are already imperfect and irregular. They make excellent puzzle pieces.” For the David Zwirner show, Lewis introduced some new processes into her practice, experimenting with traditional fabric dyes, natural dyes, rust dye and bleaching. “The rust dyeing feels like a wonderful marriage of materials because I get to use the metal objects I’ve collected over the years, larger pieces, and wrap the cloth around those to imprint them in the fabric.”
At the center of the gallery, on the floor, lies a mysterious circle composed of fabric tiles and fragments that resemble arcane tarot cards. This circular constellation seems to pulse with mystic energy as if functioning as a portal capable of communicating with other dimensions. The work, The Last Transmission, is many things, the artist tells Observer: “It can be a portal or an eye into a cosmic system, a map, or a taxonomical image of a universe. It is also an organization, symbolically and actually.”
Lewis conceived the images in the fabric tiles as clusters of beings, planets and territories. At the center stands a tower—something like a satellite or a communication device. “You can make sense of it by noticing repetition, and it might be legible and illegible at the same time,” she says. “It’s also an organization in the sense that it was the exhibition’s starting point. Systems and numbers came in handy because, at the beginning of my grieving, it was challenging to find the way just by feeling. Everything is muddied, and your entire nervous system undergoes a significant transformation.” Yet everything in the work appears in a state of constant motion—of becoming, forming and informing—as Lewis embraces a philosophy of eternal flux. Material, as she sees it, is unstable, fluid and uncertain, and therefore always open to being reimagined and reshaped through creativity.
This personal ritual of putting things in order became a therapeutic, cathartic gesture—essential for Lewis as she navigated a period of deep chaos in her life. With this installation, she has generated her own system for accessing a hidden, harmonious logic beneath the randomness of lived experience. “I started by scanning all of my objects and finding the numbers,” she says. “I made the images based on what number I had of a particular object, then finding the patterns and gathering together communities of different groups of objects—this process led to the creation of several other ‘species,’ if you will, of beings—the images depicted on the quilt. It was the most rigorous organization of these things on the largest scale, and it was a satisfying task to undertake.” In facing the world as it is, Lewis allows her practice to live in the tension between our innate longing for meaning and the entropic randomness of the universe. Her DIY process became a tool for confronting the absurd and transforming it into something expansive, generative and alive.
According to Lewis, the installation also functions as an echo or a vibration, like the ripple that spreads after a rock is thrown into a pond. “For me, it symbolizes the infinite journey. The echo never fully goes away, just like grief and just like the parts of the quilt, it transforms and takes new forms and comes around and around.”
From these reflections, it becomes clear how Lewis’s work is at once deeply personal and broadly universal—capable of channeling archetypal figures that seem to rise from a collective unconscious. When asked how much of her self is present in the work, Lewis says it becomes difficult to measure once the piece is finished. “If the work happens because of personal experiences or stemming from an event, I guess that counts for something,” she says. “The most deeply personal element is the material. My own belongings always make their way into the work in some shape or form.”
More than anything, Lewis’ practice restores the primordial, ritualistic function of art: as a bridge between the sensorial and the spiritual, between the self and something more expansive. Her sculptures and installations hum with spiritual charge—viscerally grounded in the material world, yet capable of surpassing autobiography and dissolving individual identity, as though they belonged to some otherworldly and universal dimension of experience.
“It might be a lifelong journey to figure out what the role of art is. It changes with time,” Lewis reflects. “For now, it is to help process feelings and find different pathways to communicate and alternate ways to exist in the world. It’s always been the easiest way to speak freely and clearly. I don’t expect or hope for any reaction. I’m just happy that the works can exist and that maybe people can find space for introspection or feel some comfort or expansiveness in their presence.”
Tau Lewis’s “Spirit Level” is on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles through March 29, 2025.
