When Plato speculates what it would be like to finally see “reality,” he imagines stepping from shadows cast by firelight onto the walls of a cave and into the pure light of day. Nadine Faraj reverses that vision; she takes us instead from the visible world of the everyday into an underlying realm of primordial elements—earth, air, fire, water—that exposes our common humanity and vulnerability, captured in images on the walls of a paper cave. This virtual cave, which feels like a ceremonial space in its intimate scale, is 9’ high, 13’ wide and 22’ deep, and can hold maybe 20 people. It is an extraordinary experience to contemplate. 

Cave art of the Paleolithic represents the origins of Western painting. It seems to me that Nadine is a conceptual artist who happens to be a painter, so the cave is a rich if not a challenging space in which to work. Plato sees—or thinks he sees—enough of the truth of things revealed in glimpses he catches in the everyday surface world. Nadine explores the underpinnings of a contemporary world that looks very different, a surreal world where things become other things, populated by figures real and imagined that pose basic questions of human identity.

Near the entrance, our invocation comes in the form of handprints, found not only in the Paleolithic caves of Europe but also quite dramatically at Cueva de los Manos in Argentina

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