In her first solo exhibition, Shay Mess alchemizes shadow  

 

The one thing that contemporary reinterpretations of Greek mythology seem to have in common is their inability to satisfy everyone at once. Since Christopher Nolan’s 2-hour and 53-minute film version of The Odyssey was released in theaters this July, I’ve read countless quips and takedowns about his disregard for the original text. (Nevermind that The Odyssey is the result of centuries of oral tradition, even the “original text” you’d find at a bookstore is an interpretation.) I’ve read that the armor wasn’t accurate, the women were rendered less powerful, and there’s been much to-do about Lupita Nyongo being cast as Helen of Troy. Detractors feel that a Black woman could not be the “most beautiful”; conservatives argue that ancient Greeks can only be played by white actors. I’d like to know how often these folks gave Homer any thought at all before the movie’s promo began but if all press is good press, Mr. Nolan has hit the jackpot.   

 

Everyone seems to have forgotten that The Odyssey is a myth, a story that people made up to make sense of the world. In the era before modern science, precise time, and telecommunications, people had no explanation for why it rained or stormed and whether people would return after they’d sailed away. The Greeks blamed their Gods for war, sickness, and poor weather and credited them for love, beauty, and the start of spring. All of their stories were interpretations of what they saw but couldn’t quite understand. Women were a common villain: singing mermaids who caused shipwrecks, a woman whose striking visage and hair of snakes turned men to stone.

 

 

The painting “Méduse en Fleurs” reinterprets another Greek myth. In it, a brown skinned woman looks out from the canvas with a calm expression. Her hair is pink like braiding hair you’d find at the beauty supply and coiled into gravity-defying ropes that bloom into lightly spotted blossoms that frame her face. Here, the destructive force of Medusa’s mythological threat has been transmuted into creation. 

 

“Méduse en Fleurs” is one of 12 works in Echoes of Light, the first solo exhibition show by Paris-based, French-Morrocan artist Shay Mess. The paintings are mostly portraiture, focusing on single subjects with candy-colored hair. In “Lady Blue and the Crane Beneath a Living Sky” a crane stands just in front of a woman with a cerulean bob. The woman’s tawny brown skin is smooth and polished. The bird is roughly hewn, its piled texture adds depth to the canvas. Both sets of eyes are honey brown, but the bird’s eye blocks the woman’s own, alluding to a shared perspective. In Chinese mythology, white cranes — like the one in the painting — represent longevity and come bearing heavenly messages. The crane’s positioning here can imply that what the woman sees has both a corporeal and ethereal interpretation. Despite the figures’ effulgent coiffure, the paintings map a narrative journey through loss and the new shape life takes afterward.

 

 

The largest work in the show is titled “Azal”, the Arabic word for eternity, and depicts a seated woman holding an earthenware vessel. Around her, pairs of blue and purple hands pour from their vessels into hers. Flowers sprout behind the streams and the woman’s gauzy white dress flows like an endless river against the tiled blue background. I remarked to Shay that the woman in “Azal” looked like her, as did a few other figures on the wall. They shared wide hazel eyes, a delicate heart-shaped face, and rounded cheeks but the woman was browner than Shay. In between the strokes of brown were vivid swipes of pink, blue, and electric green that lent dimension. Though she was hesitant to influence my interpretation and interested to hear my take on her work, she shared bits of context as we talked.

 

The vivid swipes were a version of kintsugi, the Japanese technique for restoring shattered pottery with gold. In the resulting repair, the scars shine and what was once broken becomes even more beautiful and valuable. She handpainted the blue zellij tiles of the background, each adorned with four fleur de lis. It had taken her one year to create all of the paintings in the show and she met the curator, Adrielle Turner, by chance just one day after she’d been bold enough to declare her desire for a solo exhibition. During Shay’s week long visit in New York, she planned to spend most of her time with her 14-year-old nephew, her late sister’s son. When she explained how she’d poured the grief of her sister’s passing into the collection, the shadows on the canvases came to be just as apparent as the swirling, candied colors in the gallery.

 

Observed linearly, in a clockwise turn around the room, we see an odyssey through bereavement. “Echoes of an Embrace” shows a pink-haired woman hugging a figure that’s made entirely of flowers and cannot return her warmth. Two of the paintings, darker, and which incorporate koi fish and angular features, were inspired by Shay’s trip to China — a step away from the familiar to adjust to a new reality. Then there’s her Medusa, replacing fear with beauty, and the woman with the crane, one eye on the day-to-day and the other on the divine. The last work in the show, “Clairvoyance I” is a painting of an eye peering through wavy clouds. It looks back with the gift of hindsight and sees how everything up to that point engendered a new vantage. 

 

 

Even in our hyper-technological age, there’s much about life that we cannot control. It can feel senseless when we watch someone endure sickness, when we lose a loved one, when we try to heal the hole that an absence leaves behind. We have the same human urge as the Greeks did to make sense of the senseless. With its symbols, beauty, and epic inspiration, Echoes of Light is its own mythology — a world where beauty comes from pain, our scars make us more beautiful, our souls can live forever, and echoes of light remain even in darkness.         

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

‘Echoes of Light’ was a solo exhibition by Shay Mess. It was curated and presented by Adrielle Turner as part of her international Collector’s Club dinner and salon series. ‘Echoes of Light’ was on view in Suite 1313 in Brooklyn Navy Yard from June 18 – 25, 2026. Remaining works are available for purchase. I attended at the invitation of Adrielle Turner and offer my thanks. Featured image photo by Walter Jackson.