Tau Lewis’s first-ever museum survey, just opened at the ICA, is called “Spirit Level,” though there’s much to hold your gaze right here on earth. A broad low-lit gallery is home to five towering icons draped in long ribbons of cloth that fall from their collars all the way to the floor. Up top, somber, expressive faces cobbled from swatches of leather and fabric imbue each with a totemic presence, like deities of some mysterious faith. Faith is as much the raw material here as Lewis’s dizzying array of dyed suede and shearling, stone and jute, seashells and coral bone. Belief in what’s behind the curtain, beyond this mortal veil, is the animating presence of its reverential stillness, a silence that feels thick and full and deafening.
Lewis, 30, has been on a meteoric rise in recent years, culminating — before this — with a star turn at the Venice Biennale in 2022, where three of her compact-car-size icon heads commanded a portion of the event’s core exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams.” Playing with faith, iconography, and age-old devotional tropes has become a powerful strategy for her, both as a refutation of staid, established orders of belief, and as a showcase for her dazzling gift for material transformation. “Spirit Level,” all of it made this year for this occasion, brims with joyful invention, fabric and dye and found objects converging into imposing figures, holistic and fully formed.
Here, Lewis repurposes familiar mythologies while weaving a few of her own. “The Night Woman,” top–to-bottom black leather and cloth studded with small bursts of glittering gold, is partly inspired by Marlon James’s 2009 novel “The Book of Night Women,” about a group of enslaved women plotting revolution in Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For Lewis, she’s a symbol of agency, resilience, and power. “The Doula” looms in dark nautical shades — pale aquamarine patches of suede and cloth flowing into shadowy gray-black woven with bright flashes of fabric — life swarming while descending the depths. The figure is a play on the myth of Drexciya, a fable created by a 1990s Detroit-based electronic music duo of the same name that imagined an underwater society formed by the unborn children of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. She embodies the power and terror of the sea both to give life, and to take it.
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An enthusiastic scavenger, Lewis has always drawn energy and inspiration from found objects, and returns the favor with the breath of new life. Venice, and “Spirit Level,” are the cosmic iterations of that practice, the transformation complete. They’re also a pivot for an artist whose work began as intensely personal, a practice of piecing together not just scavenged objects but a sense of self. In 2017, when we both lived in Toronto, I dropped by Lewis’s modest studio in what was then a semi-industrial corner of the city’s west end.
Lewis, in her early 20s, was already someone to watch. She was self-taught, free of the intellectual baggage of formal art education, and also its hands-on training. But her rough-hewn work merged perfectly with her authenticity of purpose. In the studio, amid the mounds of cast-offs — old sweat shirts and fabric ends, tangles of wire, rusty pipe, concrete, and broken toys — were plaster casts of her own body, whether limbs or hands, or her face. One of the pieces that grew out of it was the first work you saw when you walked into “To Begin Again,” the ICA’s big group show in 2022 about childhood. A child-size figure with a cast of Lewis’s face, slumped in a kiddie chair and draped in scraps of her own childhood clothing, it was called “Untitled (play dumb to catch wise),” 2017.
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Back then, Lewis’s scavenging and re-membering were a very specific effort to puzzle herself together. She was born in Toronto; her father was Jamaican, and Black; her mother was Canadian, and white. Lewis had grown up in an era when Black Canadian culture was all but invisible; her early work was intensely focused on her own struggle to reconcile her disparate roots. As she told me then, it was also aimed at addressing the “erasure of Black Canadian narratives from Canadian art.”
Arriving in New York in 2018, Lewis quickly took off, her ideas growing more expansive along with the monumental works that are now her signature. Within these outsize figures, though, Lewis’s spirit still dwells. “The Night Woman” is at least in part her acknowledgment of — and triumph over — the history of racial injustice embedded in her Jamaican heritage. “The Doula,” perhaps, is a reflection on and reconciliation with the powers of the sea she witnessed firsthand near her father’s family home in Negril.
On the floor, an expanse of fabric strips is arranged in a circle and festooned with fragments of metal, seashells, bits of glass and wood; its radial pattern suggests a celestial map, or a set of runes that describe, perhaps, a spiritual universe. It’s called “The Last Transmission,” the title of a song by Drexicya; with its deliberate arrangement, it feels at once aspirational and futile, a speculative guide to the outer limits of the unknown.
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Cosmic though it may be, its scavenger spirit — beauty and order, from castoffs and chaos — is vintage Lewis, the product of a boundless curiosity in search of what larger truths might be extracted from a world that feels random and disconnected.
At the core of all of Lewis’s work is a disarming emotional honesty, a vulnerability that, while more buffered in the newer works, still shines through. “The Miracle” is the last piece finished before the show and a softly gorgeous beacon of hope.
With its hands clasped in front of it, drapes of warm ivory cascading from its arms, it emanates peaceful certainty. Lewis conceived it with the medusa jellyfish in mind, a remarkable creature whose dead carcass falls to the ocean floor, where it spontaneously gives birth to new life. Unique to living creatures, the jellyfish defies scientific convention and dares you to believe — in a cosmic order, in hope, in things unseen. The “Spirit Level,” grounded in the hard work of Lewis’s own hands, aspires to something beyond this earthly plane, a universe of intuitive and emotional connection beyond time and space. It is, in every way, out there.
TAU LEWIS: SPIRIT LEVEL
Through Jan. 20. Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org
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Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.