Mengna Da
Mengna Da is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.
Melissa McGill
RED REGATTA: riflessi
By Mengna Da
Imagine the Rothko Chapel, but filled with a series of close-up photographs of blue-green waters with reflected shades of red, circulating the surrounding walls in a flowy composition. Melissa McGill’s RED REGATTA: riflessi, currently on view in TOTAH’s Lower East Side gallery, builds a meditative space where the audience is so close to the sculptural details of the waves and the tangible texture of the reds that one feels almost bathing in them.
Perilous Bodies
By Mengna DaBody is a battleground. Body is a weapon. Body is testimony of endless fights against racial, class, and sexual oppression.
Whose Reality?
By Mengna DaHere I am, standing on Fifth Avenue just across from Apple’s recently reopened Batcave of a store and chasing a liquid, care-free form as it flies in and out of the midtown skyscrapers surrounding us. While the shimmering “ghost” takes on various colors and shapes, sometimes even forming words, a high-pitched voice, reminiscent, perhaps, of Bjork, sings along with it.
Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel
By Mengna DaTwo fried eggs and a kebab on a table evoking a female figure; a cocoon-shaped swing made of cotton-filled tights in the shape of tits; a fearless woman wearing a t-shirt that reads “SELFISH IN BED”—these images, posted all over social media and New York City subway, depict artworks featured in Sarah Lucas’s first U.S. survey, Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel, occupying three floors of the New Museum.
