Mokha Laget: Elemental drift embodies Laget’s decades-long, multimedia investigation into geometry, percep­tion, and abstraction. Born in North Africa, French is her native language. Laget is an explorer, transforming herself and her artistic practice as she absorbs new geographies and applies innovative technologies to her art. In a 2021 conversation, art writer Lucy Lippard asked Laget whether her inter­nationalism has allowed her deeper understanding and affected her artwork. Laget believes her myriad experiences allow her to see that “reality” is not concrete or predictable; it is fluid and ever changing, just like the colors and shapes in her works.

Perhaps it is the belief that reality is fluid that fuels Laget’s desire to chal­lenge perceptions of form and color and to offer viewers a quasi-synesthetic experience. Her richly hued, shaped canvas Sidelight defies rational perceptibility by refusing to obey the tra­ditional rectilinear picture plane. Eclipse #1’s external perimeter harmoni­ously coexists with contrasting interior shapes, whose colors are experienced as movement and dimensionality. In Optic slide, colors recede and protrude, hover and tilt-activating the wall with architectural tension and optical play. Laget purposely alters perspective lines to engage the viewer’s own imagina­tion and creative impulse. Measure for Measure introduces open, portal-like voids; while Laget’s Arc series pushes outward with sculptural insistence, creating a rhythm that is both formal and felt.

Lucy Lippard writes, “Laget is a spatial trickster. Color is her accomplice. At first glance, her work is formally handsome; at second glance, it demands something of your perceptual skills. She invites the viewer into an encounter that resembles a kind of intellectual play and, at the same time, expands one’s sense of form and color … l really like the spatial ambiguities … or dissonances. It makes looking at the work an active rather than passive experience. A viewer has to test her own responses by looking again and again.”

Laget has long pushed painting beyond surface and into a durational, spatial, sonic experience with her visual scores. She hears imaginary music in her mind, then draws a score to “see” what she hears. In Elemental drift, Laget collabo­rates with new media artist Morgan Barnard to break her abstractions apart, allowing them to drift through original sonic space and recombine into new forms and evolve again and again. Laget writes about this work: “abstraction becomes motion, pigment becomes pulse, and geometry resonates in time”-extending her inquiry into syn­esthetic translation and interdisciplin­ary form.

Laget’s new alchemical ink paintings on paper “feel” almost primordial with their topographical sense of sediment and minimal color. Their intimate scale exists in contrast to the monumental, geological forms they contain. These slow, quiet works are dense microcosms of memory, matter, and suspended meaning, where ephemeral gestures carry planetary weight.