Christopher Squier
Rainbow (Redacted)
MORA Art Museum, Jersey City, NJ
May 17 – June 1, 2025

Christopher Squier is a New York-based visual artist. His practice explores optics and the harmonics of light in contemporary visual culture; he engages with research around luminescence, transparency, and invisibility in order to position vision as a historically-altered and politically-contentious experience. Squier works across media, including drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation, and digital textiles.

Recent projects have engaged with contested histories of light, whether through the opposition of wave and particle, colonial-era histories of science and superstition, or the maritime empires built on the technology of the Fresnel lens. His current body of work repurposes imagery from Cold War era physics textbooks as the basis for colored pencil and graphite translations of the ripple tank experiment, an education tool used for scientific demonstrations. The setup for this experiment resembles an aquarium-like tank, illuminated from below, which works by activating thin metal levers to produce vibrational waves in water. These waves can be observed interacting constructively and destructively, interfering with one another in complex and dynamic motion and as standing waves. Thus, the drawings speak to the optical experience of light, stripped down and isolated in the laboratory.

Rainbows and the visible spectra of light appear throughout the exhibition in shifting gradients and visual arcs. These forms recall the rainbow as a fleeting symbol of luck, providence, and tenderness, while also nodding to its ambivalent history in medieval and Renaissance painting as a bellwether of judgement and the apocalypse. The colors of the rainbow were once coded with Christian myth and mysticism: blue for the flood that came before, green for the present state of mercy, and a golden, flickering yellow-white-red for the hellfires to come. In one group of drawings, graphite renderings of rainbows, spectra, and moiré patterns are enclosed beneath dark, tinted glass in an act of redaction and concealment. The arrest and capture of these arcs and bows under semi-opaque glass replicates the conditions of viewership found when witnessing a true rainbow; as the angle and intensity of a room’s ambient light shifts, the drawing beneath the glass comes into focus, sometimes visible, at other times fading from view. 

The original ripple tank experiment was designed by American photographer Berenice Abbott, whose pioneering approach to photography drew on the techniques of the Surrealists to form a distinct mixture of documentary and distortion. Abbott’s demonstrations of light’s wave motion were produced within her larger photographic project titled Documenting Science (1939–1958) and were presented amid the political climate ushered in by Joseph McCarthy. Relatedly, the drawings in this exhibition were initially begun in 2019 during the U.S. congressional investigation of foreign election interference. By repurposing Abbott’s photographic scenario, these drawings ask what is entailed in political and electoral interference, whether by foreign powers or politicians at home, and how we can make sense of large-scale distortions in truth within the public realm. 

Moreover, the drawings shown here make visible the vibrations of energy found in all matter, combining rhythm and motion on the surface of the sheet of paper. The result takes form as a broad investigation of visual phenomena and indeterminacy within and beyond the rational, controlled space of the laboratory, the textbook, and the white cube.

Squier received his master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a bachelor’s in fine art from Grinnell College. He has participated in numerous artist residencies, including at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kunstnarhuset Messen, La Fragua Artist Residency, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Playa Residency, and Untitled Space. In 2021, he received an Artists Corps Grant from the city of New York. His work has been exhibited at BABEL Visningsrom for Kunst, California College of the Arts, the De Young Museum, the Expatriate Archive Centre, the Hubbell Street Galleries, and the ZIBA Prague Glass Experience Museum. For the recurring sculpture festival Play/Ground, Squier presented a monumental tapestry in collaboration with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Re:Source Art, and Explore & More Children's Museum. The artist exhibits regularly with Amos Enos Gallery, an alternative, nonprofit platform for professional artists and one of New York City’s longest operating artist-run gallery spaces. He is a founding member of the arts writing collective Dissolve.

MORA Art Museum
80 Grand Street
Jersey City, NJ 07302-4522