The nondescript door leading up to Bunker Projects’ second-floor exhibition space got a fresh coat of paint late last year, going from sour green to sunflower yellow. When I walked up the stairs during February’s “Unblurred”—the Bloomfield-Garfield’s First Friday gallery crawl—and rounded the corner to step into the rear exhibition space, my eyes were at once stunned and delighted by the exceptionally bold colors of Sophia Marie Pappas’s exhibition High & Mighty. Let Bunker’s new door hue serve as a signal for what lies inside this month.
During these trying times, I want color! I need color; the kind of color so brightly saturated that I start to feel the rods and cones in my eyes, drenched in spectral vibrancy, begin to hum from the serotonin. Based on the conversations I heard during the opening celebration, I am not alone in this craving for color. Pappas gladly gives the people what they want.
With High & Mighty, Pappas cleverly deploys her skills as a muralist (her 2022 mural Win Some Lose Some is on view 24/7 in the Coral Street alleyway behind Bunker), painting the exhibition title directly on the walls, which are broken up in blue registers along the top and bottom. I was told the script and floral embellishments were executed without any planning, stenciling, or wall marking, which is highly impressive given just how precise everything in the space feels. The blue bands give hard-edge contrast to a rich, warm yellow, onto which hang a tight constellation of five paintings on panel, flanked by two framed works in embroidery and four handmade art books evenly spread across two shelves.
I simply did not know where to start first. My eyes passively felt the spectrum of Pappas’s palette all at once, as though the walls were reaching out to embrace me. With a fiery rubescence somewhere between carmine and scarlet, the central panel, entitled I Met a Traveler from an Antique Land, epitomizes the exhibition’s eclectic, exploratory nature.
Deploying a multi-point perspective, Pappas depicts a blue tiger pouncing vertically — fangs barred, a clawed paw outstretched — towards a highly emotive horse. All the while, a white-masked nude figure with yellow skin remains confidently poised and neutrally expressive on the back of their steed. Around these figures, floating flatly on their shared plane, are eight squares. Four of these squares are smaller than the other three; three smaller ones contain green linear, ribbon-like compositions, three more contain floral still-lives, and the seventh square contains somewhat of a coat of arms— three black horses, donned in the same riding gear as our masked figure’s horse, with an array of 10 lances fanned out across the back.
One can feel traces of stylization in Pappas’ figures stemming from Mesoamerican traditions, the use of flat, reductive space and forms, as well as the use of single, planar colors recall illuminated manuscripts. In Pappas’ world, these cross-cultural traditions become a sort of playground, a toolbox, a well. Color stands as backdrop and becomes lines, becomes form; from form, glyphic motifs arise, weaving a cohesive visual tapestry that tells not one singular story, but a nonlinear matrix of potential stories stimming from richly diverse cultural traditions. Pappas opens art history and refracts it through her visual language, allowing us to piece together a history, a narrative, of our own.
On the opposite side of the gallery, the primary work displayed becomes the wall itself: a mural centering a hand rendered in that familiar red hue, slowly becoming, fingers outstretching, in a dark, trompe l’oeil passageway leading to a portal glowing with a familiar blue. Floral tondos sit in the top corners of this dark corridor, like radiating sconces. Two square panel paintings, King of Kings (left) and Perfect Husband Perfect Wife (right), hang on either side of the hand, appearing to float in this imagined space.
I took a semester on sacred spaces in grad school, and one of the topics of that course I remember most is the role of a clearly defined threshold — a delineated buffer between the profane world and the sacred space on the other side. The ingenious use of mural elements make the work feel ornamental in a way that only enhances its impact; its presence engulfs you, it immerses you in its world not unlike an experiential work of installation art. The numinous quality of a sacred world emerges from the space that Pappas provides — timeless, dreamlike, and full of wonder. We enter through a yellow door and step up into an alternate place, into a plane where craft and painterly wonder coalesce. I exited back through that same yellow door, carrying with me the visions of a world previously unseen, feeling high and mighty.
Sophia Marie Pappas’s High & Mighty communes alongside Madison Manning’s corporeal and equally vibrant Forced Necessary Rest at Bunker Projects through March 16.
Photography by Sophia Marie Pappas
J. Zach Hunley (they/he) is a Pittsburgh-based modern and contemporary art historian, critic, photographer, collector of things, and proud father to a senior guinea pig. With a keen observational eye, they use their writing as a means to refract their deep appreciation for formal aesthetics through a socially engaged lens. They hold an M.A. in Art History from West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV, docent for the Troy Hill Art Houses, and regularly contribute exhibition reviews to Pittsburgh’s art scene magazine, Petrichor.
