The work surrounds you, covers intricate and breathtaking and challenging. Flight Patterns explores duality. Commonalities and differences, modernity and tradition, deeply entwined relationships. Through ornate sculptural installations of light and cast shadow as well as embroidered drawings, Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha creates a sacred space and an interactive experience— she tells of her own life and reality as a native in her country and immigrant in the United States but also asks the observer to project their own world of inclusion and otherness onto the work. In the artist’s own words, “The onlooker’s subjective experiences of alienation and belonging become part of the piece and its identity.”
Agha’s work blends modern and traditional methods and media, and it connects the historic with the contemporary. In this temporal intersection, Agha explores culture and politics, society and gender, religion and the environment and labor. Her captivating pieces are a glimpse into the world and experience of the artist—and a chance to see yourself reflected within the patterns.
This exhibition is the kind of impactful and moving art for which the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens has become well-known. Their commitment to visionary art and artists was recognized recently with a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. This capacity-building and strategic planning grant will allow the museum to build on its multi-year initiatives, which include finalizing the first phase of a campus master plan and expanding communications efforts, and to continue to bring the community art that is full of diversity and vitality.
Flight Patterns will be open February 24th to April 30th.
