New art show at Jacksonville's Cummer Museum explores shadows and light

At one point or another, we've all tried to make shadow puppets, twisting our fingers in front of a light to throw a shadow that looks like a rabbit or a dog or whatever.

A new exhibition at Jacksonville's Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens takes that to a whole new level. "Anila Quayyum Agha: Flight Patterns" features elaborate internally lit metal sculptures that explore the link between light and shadow.

The show is noteworthy for how few pieces are in it. It's housed in the museum's Mason Gallery, where it will remain through April 30. Two of the three rooms in the gallery have just one art piece each.

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The first room is home to "This is NOT a Refuge!" At first glance, it looks like a decorative wrought-iron playhouse you might find in someone's backyard, with elaborate floral designs covering the sides and the roof. Two light bulbs hang inside the structure and all of the overhead lights in the room are turned off, resulting in a riot of floral shadows covering the mint-green covered walls, the floors, the ceilings and the people. The lights themselves don't move — artist Anila Quayyam Agha said she tried that and it gave her vertigo — but the shadows shift as people walk through the room.

Agha was born in Pakistan and splits time between homes in Indianapolis and Augusta, Ga. She said she was told in graduate school that she should study Western art and that artworks created by men were more important than those made by women.

"From that point on, I started studying pattern in different ways," she said during a preview tour of the show.

The patterns that cover the piece are floral but have an Asian feel to them. Agha said it was inspired by the patterns on a bookstand that holds her mother's copy of the Quran. It's meant as a commentary on refugees, she said, and represents the sense of displacement and loss one feels when moving to another part of the world.

"That has been a constant in my life," she said.

The gallery's second room, painted a darker green, features "Beautiful Despair," a large cube suspended from the ceiling, covered on all six sides with laser-cut patterns. Again, two bulbs hang inside the structure, covering the room with densely patterned shadows. The wall colors reminded Agha of Florida and the interior of the piece is painted a shade of blue that can be found in lapis lazuli, a gem found in her homeland.

The piece was inspired by the pandemic, when people around the world sheltered in their homes and the untended wilderness sprang to life.

"I was thinking of how lonely people had become," Agha said. "When the human race came to a standstill, other denizens of the woods began to rise."

Two-dimensional pieces and externally-lit 3D pieces are housed in the gallery's third room. Cubes mounted at odd angles on the wall are lit from ceiling-mounted lights, throwing shadows that seem to move. "They are stationary," Agha said. "They really are."

This isn't Agha's first exhibition in Jacksonville. In 2018, she had a show called "The Greys In-Between" at MOCA Jacksonville's Atrium Gallery. That show featured hanging sculptures that slowly turned, casting patterns on the Atrium's 40-foot walls.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 'Flight Patterns' brings shadows, light to Jacksonville's Cummer Museum