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Thomas Houseago’s Genesis and Exodus

Thomas Houseago’s Genesis and Exodus

Annie Lyall Slaughter
Thomas Houseago
Installation view. Thomas Houseago’s “Night Sea Journey.” Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

“The only reason I’m alive, and I know this medically, for a fact,” Thomas Houseago said on the opening day of Night Sea Journey, a Herculean exhibition charting his emotional recovery over the last five years, “is that I was able to make art. Period.” Chronicling the artist’s psychological shift from a self-harming threat to himself to a radiant, impassioned eccentric who preaches of the “heroic” and “fearless” potential of human kindness, Night Sea Journey is more than an exhibition—it is the moving story of a soul once bound by barbed wire that has risen into light.

In a city where psychosis is a source of spectacle, crisis, and shame, Lévy Gorvy Dayan embraces Houseago’s history in all its trigger-warning intensity, presenting a three-story exhibition and an eye-opening documentary that lay bare the healing journey of a man who, in 2019, found himself in blood-covered sheets trying to crush his skull with a rock. At LGD’s landmark space on East 64th Street—a site that made history in 2017 when it became the most expensive townhouse ever sold in Manhattan—the depths of human darkness find a surprising home in this Beaux-Arts style building built for the city’s elite. To enter, visitors must warily bypass an eight-foot-tall figure that is on one side a ghastly skeleton-man crudely carved from plaster, and on the other, an eyeless minotaur whose wooden head, carved by chain-saw, is supported by a neck of steel bars, making it feel insurmountable and almost bionic.

Thomas Houseago
installation view. Thomas Houseago’s “Night Sea Journey.” Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

The first floor represents the metaphoric shadowlands of his journey, or what Houseago calls “the dark night of the soul.” A place where rust-red serpent masks and gargantuan demons with erect penises become living breathing entities memorialized into bronze, trapping their maker within the harrowing grip of a recently resurfaced memory of childhood rape. Personal and mythological demons collide here in what Houseago calls the “belly” of the show, but upstairs, it is life—not death—that prevails, offering a happy ending. Visitors wind their way up the staircase, first ascending into the “treehouse” of earthly possibility, and then rising into the metaphorical heavens, where a room-spanning tapestry offers a gilded sunrise burning with renewed energy as it breaks through radiant orange, silver, and blue light.

Thomas Houseago
Installation view. Thomas Houseago’s “Night Sea Journey.” Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

While such a deliberate delineation between hell, earth, and heaven, spread across three floors—each representing a different psychological state in his recovery—may sound hokey (especially when one finds Sunrise [2024] on the top floor, where skylights illuminate the room from above), “Night Sea Journey” transcends critique by positioning Houseago’s work as a form of life-saving psychotherapy. That’s not to say the show, or the work, isn’t serious. During intensive treatment, Houseago became reacquainted with natural elements and domestic joys—the earthy scent of California sage, a boiled egg breakfast, and a bouquet of flowers. On the second floor, a sensitivity emerges in Houseago’s sculptures that feel disarming compared to the behemoth, chain-saw carved minotaurs on floor one, illustrating Houseago’s remarkable ability to sculpt the human experience. In my favorite room, these moments emerge from redwood, plaster, and bronze with the speed and deliberateness (or so I imagine), of what Plato once called “divine madness”—that instant when poetic inspiration strikes the most gifted among us. A sliced loaf of bread and butter is quickly fashioned from redwood, its rough-hewn edges left jagged as if another moment of joy struck before there was time to smooth them down. Though I doubt that’s what truly happened, these works, rather than succumbing to the demons of darkness, magnify beauty, willing it to be deeply seen.

Thomas Houseago
Installation view. Thomas Houseago’s “Night Sea Journey.” Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

Also on the second floor, four mammoth eggs, each crafted from plaster, stand tall on pedestals—some appear intentionally broken, others accidentally smashed—yet all share traits of beauty, potential, and imperfection. Named either “Birth” or “Cosmic Egg” (I and II), these seeds of life represent a larger “tipping point,” the artist says, when he wondered, “Am I sane enough to make a beautiful egg?” Sane is relative, Houseago’s story shows; perhaps the bigger takeaway here, for viewers at least, is the symbolic significance of the egg as a feat of resilience. As the polished, perfected plaster forms teetered then tore, Houseago picked up the pieces—literally—deeming them worthy even still. Climbing uphill, Houseago reworked himself (and this form) again and again—“grieving and weaving,” he calls it.

As if suffering from the sudden recollection of childhood rape (by his father) was not enough to bear, Houseago faced another devastating blow while still in treatment: the unexpected death of his counselor and spiritual guide Danny Smith. Today, Houseago credits his own life to the “magical” man who helped the artist break free from shackles and enter a creative space where casual, pressure-free drawing and painting evolved into an “explosion” of sculpture, igniting Houseago’s creative flame at a time when he was certain his days as an artist were over.

Thomas Houseago
Installation view. Thomas Houseago’s “Night Sea Journey.” Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

Finally, we reach the highest floor, where Houseago can transgress beyond his trauma and bathe in the “sacred cleanliness” of the Pacific Ocean, awakening to the impermanence of life. Occupying every square inch of wall space in the room, Sunrise (2024) is as much about the ongoing legacy and life of Smith as it is about Houseago’s final transcendence into a state of eternal bliss where he has so much “love for that moon,” as he says in the accompanying film, “[that] all I wanted to do was paint it.” Splattered with buckets of paint, this tapestry emphasizes the process over the destination; reducing it to mere aesthetic qualities or artistic rigor would diminish the meaning and message of the exhibition. I reckon this is not the end of this work nor of “Night Sea Journey,” but rather the beginning of what Dominique Lévy termed Houseago’s “genesis and exodus”—a metaphorical homecoming for the sculptor as he returns to the art world and himself, healed and reborn.

Night Sea Journey is on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York through October 19 and includes a film on Houseago directed by Andrew Dominik and produced by Saul Germaine, PJ van Sandwijk, and Paul Kahil. The film is screened on the first floor of the gallery on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 12 PM, 2 PM, and 4 PM. Reserve here

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