There is an unstated hierarchy of forms at work in this enigmatic not-quite-solo, not-quite-collective exhibition. “Hereafter” was conceived by Simon Moretti and features works by well over a dozen “guest” others. The artist’s wall-mounted neon, Double Vortex (after Emanuel Swedenborg), 2025, is the show’s cipher. This work’s very shape—like a ram’s horns atop an Ionic column—points to the heavens. Inviting the celestial thus into the gallery, it suggests that every work of art is an instantiation of an idea conceived by a superior being. That idea is made explicit—yet remains unattainable—in the theories of the eighteenth-century polymath theologian and author of Arcana Coelestia Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose “heavenly mysteries” shape the host institution.
Paul Becker’s 2020 oil portrait of a young woman (peculiar because she’s half-turned her back to the painter and sports what might be a pair of wings), Michael E. Smith’s glossy but battered 2023 floor sculpture (shaped vaguely like the head of Buddha), and David Noonan’s 2024 lunar Eclipse print (like those from your grandfather’s dusty science textbook) echo Moretti’s (and Swedenborg’s) interest in the worshipful potential of symbols. Its Double, Donna Huddleston’s 2019 architectural pencil drawing, hits at the limit of knowledge ever available to an artist. The work’s plain composition and the inclusion of a crucifix makes up in form what the work obscures in its title.
The exhibition’s hang hardly discriminates between contemporary art mainstays like Linder and Derek Jarman, Swedenborg’s paraphernalia, and William Blake’s illustrations from the gallery’s collection. “Hereafter,” therefore, is neither a taxonomy nor a chronology. Either would ultimately be a distraction. The show leaves it to the angels, literally, to turn the viewer’s stray mind to the heavens in Paul Heber-Percy’s 2024 oil painting Antiphon. This part prayer, part apparition proves that not even art can exhaust the mysteries of existence.
