What is the nature of our phenomenal world? Is it as solid and unyielding as a city made of steel and glass? Or perhaps as fleeting and ephemeral as a grace note of incense left behind in an empty shrine room? The ten paintings in Leidy Churchman’s Trick of Sight call forth visions, dreams, and incantations in service to exploring this fundamental question.

The title of the show is culled from a chapter in Finding Rest in Illusion, a seminal Tibetan Buddhist text by the great 14th century teacher Longchenpa. The three volume discourse is essentially a step by step guide to attain- ing realisation in one lifetime. In the chapter entitled Trick of Sight we are well along the way in our journey with instructions to view all phenomena as simply the play of the mind, empty of any substance, but rich with possibilities.

Personal in their iconography and exploration of Buddhist philosophy, these paintings abide within a framework and vocabulary of experience that resonates within all of us. Family, friends, love, longing, joy, and despair. Everything is included in Churchman’s invitation for us to dive into the deep end of our own understanding of what’s what.

Their own spiritual journey, a path that weaves from classic Zen to esoteric Tibetan tantra, provides a ground for these explorations. But almost any sense of the sacred in these images is conjured from an alchemy of the every day that transcends any specific religiosity.

At once tender and exuberant, the paintings excavate and reassemble words and objects in intriguing orders that compel the viewer to find their own key. Often slyly humorous, they mine the ordinary with a casual precision that gives way, at times, to a gleeful game of hide and seek. No matter where the eye is drawn, something always seems to be happening at the edge of one’s vision.

Churchman has long used the painted word as part of their artistic vocabulary. Some earlier works envisioned book covers, signs, pizza boxes, and credit cards. However, in Trick of Sight the words emerge from the interior flow of uncontrived experience. In the small and delightful painting Sentence, that single word appears above indecipherable calligraphic swoops of purple and white above a deep oceanic blue green background. There’s a sense of urgency conveyed in the brushwork but its up to us to parse the meaning of this moment.

In larger works with multiple words, a kind of skittering visual poetics comes into play. In Bardo Cargo, one of the largest paintings in the series, Churchman calls up an exquisitely bodacious geography that teems with information pinned by both words and image. Mother, grandmother, love, giraffe love, face, and pillow are a few of the words included. Two vessels, one labelled pain and the other joy, appear to share a liquid back and forth. Shapes like windows offer views into the states of loneliness, despair, greed, insecurity, and fear. But the windows themselves seem to be dissolving like the underlined emotions. Is the black square at the centre of the canvas with the words “the building” painted within it a representation of Churchman’s own mind? And are the words and images surrounding it simply discreet angles of awareness of the continued and unceasing flow of our thoughts?

The bright yellow diamond-gridded background and vibrant claws that breach the boundaries of Bardo Cargo echo back to Churchman’s Mountains Walking. That 30-foot-long triptych marked their appearance at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, riffed on Monet’s Waterlilies, and rested on massive easels with carved walnut claws at their base. Meanwhile, fast-forward to Bardo Cargo where luminous cloud puffs identified with the word “compassion” drift across the entire surface of this vivid atlas.

Arriving at a moment when our world seems ever more in flux, Churchman’s latest paintings reflect an expansive journey that is not bound by time. Churchman’s work has always reflected a heartfelt investigation into the nature of existence, from the curve of a conch shell to the visage of a cat seeming ready to pounce. The paintings in Trick of Sight masterfully dance between the seen and unseen worlds, inviting us to experience a sense of delightful dislocation where images, ideas, and emotions, arise and disappear in the direct experience of the Now.

Text by Gayle Hanson