Once the intimate whisper of women’s boudoirs and their trusted makeup artists, over the last two decades the eyelash has fluttered herself into power. With the rise of reality television displaying the engine rooms of drag queen culture and the intimate lives of housewives and their shared aesthetic interests, the lash has batted her way from a tool of coquettish flirtation to a standard of beauty, a symbol of personality, and for some, a don’t leave home without ‘em daily essential. The pink and green tubes of my memory given a backseat to the dangerous application of full strips from the passenger seat. The lash leads now, beating out her neighboring brow, the complementing counterpart. Often accidentally discarded, whether in raucous abandon or tearful hysteria, inevitably invoking fear when mistaken for a living thing, my first question upon viewing Divine Heavy was one I’ve asked far too often: “Now, whose lashes are these?”

Refusing the support of a works list in hand and without wall tags to depend on, I was not only convinced that eyelashes were the materiality of Deondre Davis’ Untitled (Corner Work), but further persuaded when Mo Costello’s Untitled (QuikTrip III), directly facing it, came into view. These were the makings of a night out on the town, and the soot of Costello’s QuikTrip napkin, the eyelash glue wiped away in haste, tearing the delicate fabric of the canvas ever so slightly.

Watergate is the trending topic of the day. Nixon has requested and received the resignation of both the Chief of Staff and the Attorney General of the United States.¹ Meanwhile, in art world gossip, Picasso has uttered his famous last words over dinner at his hilltop villa, while pouring up glasses of wine for his friends: “Drink to me, Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore.” This would mark not only the death of the artist but also the death of the modernist movement, ushering us into the Contemporary in both the literal and the artistic senses. In the wake of this death, Paul McCartney, at another dinner table with Dustin Hoffman during the filming of Papillon (1973), would arrange those words to music to later record them with the Wings. Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me) would release December of that year.

Concurrently, at yet another table, amidst the deluge of these updates in the political and art worlds, other, more personal frustrations shape the two large-scale sculptural paintings of Judy Cooke’s that anchor the exhibition. Sienna Curve and Bone of Contention, both now 52 years old, mark the beginning of the contemporary art movement, which changes our conceptions of the “artwork” itself and invites us to interrogate its form, materiality, and the location from which art emerges. Now, the kitchen becomes the artist’s studio, and a newborn child, a muse.

While contemporary art, especially in today’s instant culture (a term of intervention which essayist and poet Shayla Lawson coined at yet another table), looks deeply at the time in which we live, responding to the sociopolitical milieu; it is at the same time deeply personal, abstracting, as life does, the larger political and cultural impulses into the quotidian. We cannot see ideas and structures forming to work against us. We do, however, live within their implications. How do policy and prevailing logic show up at both the dinner table and the doctor’s office? Under that pressure, and often despair, art acts as the manifestation of what our spirits and physical bodies can no longer hold.

For Cooke’s pieces, from her tarp series, we will not need the assistance of a works list. In the right-hand corner of both, the work's title, the artist's name, and the year are marked in her own hand. In Bone of Contention, specifically, Cooke discloses this additional detail: The month of April 1973.

The artist’s frustration, however, was not with the news of the day. Neither the death of a major artist nor the betrayal of the American citizens' trust in their elected officials informed this work. Cooke, actually, was actively lamenting her personal experience with gynecological practitioners after the birth of her child. At her kitchen table, with her newborn son not far away, she’d craft these 92 and 78-inch charcoal paintings on canvas tarp. As geometric abstraction suggests, we cannot determine what these markings might represent, but we are familiar with these figures: a prominent triangle, a square determined to take shape, figures that appear alphabetical, but show up in reverse. Missing pieces that cause shadows, patches that trigger questions. Staples that bind together and grommets that allow suspension.

Two white walls are positioned parallel to the only floor-to-ceiling window in the gallery space. Running just alongside the load-bearing walls of the room, the vestibule opens up into a sacred space, reminiscent of the center aisle of a sanctuary. The center aisle now opens to the traffic of patrons and is aided by natural light that beckons the viewer into this central spectacle. In the interplay of Davis’ and Costello’s works, I consider that in all my years of attending shows in this space, I have never witnessed the gallery oriented in this way. These large windows, which open up as doors, must have replaced an original loading dock when this building was no doubt a factory of some sort. The apocalypse of this former entrance way at the center of the room opens a portal for the titular musing: that which is both divine and heavy.

Because the dinner table refuses to excuse itself from our conversation, I must mention yet another - this time in the fall of 2023 at the Dinky Bar & Kitchen on the campus of Princeton University, where I was introduced to the artist Caleb Jamel Brown, whose work occupies opposite corners of the show. I learned then and was reminded immediately upon viewing—still without a works list—of his practice, which is deeply informed by his trade as a plumber. Crafting art from the detritus of work, hand-me-downs, and kitschy decor, Brown’s work is that of devotion, preservation, and celebration of the past and lives of his elders. Deep in the Trenches, Drinking from the Well (2025), an assemblage sculpture born of foam, oil, fiberglass cloth and plastic roof cement presents another sort of portal, perhaps a spout. Springing out from the exposed brick of the northwest corner of the white cube, Marks of Worship: Flesh Cover at Dawn (2025), is silver-soldered copper, weathered with age, suggesting a previous life. Bracketed into the perpendicular wall, the piece continues, a singular swatch of copper, jutting out independently—bowed almost—toward its larger constellation.

The divine is no more directly pronounced throughout the exhibit than in Lyric Shen’s Shuiyuan (2025). I eavesdrop on a pair of women on a Saturday gallery hop considering the application process of the divine image affixed to a slab of porcelain. So begins their wonder. More praise is lauded on Daxue (2025), the neighboring work born from ink transferred on paper clay. Blending ceramics, printmaking, and photography, the artist’s hand is at play in each element of the work. In the former piece, one looks through a window and experiences the hyperreal, the shadows and reflection of the built environment within the image so distinct, we question if we stand in the city with the artist ourselves. The marked surface of the porcelain could easily be the grain of an old photo, challenging our vision again. How might these things cling to one another? What occurs in the process of application?

Whether cheekily rubbing the holes of a vehicle with the gas station napkins or reappropriating old copper for a kind of second life or afterlife, to play with the theme, Divine Heavy invites us into the deeply personal by warping the functions and outcomes of that which is deeply familiar. Whether our tribute is praise of the divine or in lament of healthcare systems that fail us, we know these symbols. We’ve touched these materials. It is that familiarity, with materials not inaccessible to us, no matter how skillfully applied to one another, that brings us into closer view of the work. The residue of brick shavings in Davis’ Untitled, collecting itself in the bottom like sediment in a glass of wine, a paint swatch left behind in the facade of Brown’s Deep in the Trenches, Drinking from the Well—much like the trappings of a junk drawer from a home improvement project undone—these are the things we know. Amidst the burden of being and the associated sociopolitical weight, despite the heavy/ness of the world, this is what we can make Divine.

When Davis’ eyelashes, or synthetic fibers as the works list describes them, are not on the corner, they sometimes look like biblically accurate angels. Costello’s soot is not the tool of application for these lashes, either, although they complement each other in such striking ways. While a story, easy or deeply complex, can be made of these works in their fellowship together, I leave the gallery challenged to recognize that what we know as familiar should not be dismissed as common.