Dario Mohr
Ensconced

Exhibition Dates: February 8 - April 12, 2026
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 1-3pm

This exhibition brings together a body of work that reconsiders objects of display: architectural fixtures, vessels, and framing devices as mechanisms through which visibility, desire, and power have historically been negotiated. Drawing from the formal language of sconces, the works examine how bodies are illuminated, elevated, or concealed, and how these gestures continue to shape contemporary ways of seeing.

The term sconce originates from the Old French esconce and the Latin absconsa, meaning “to conceal” or “a hiding place.” Historically, sconces were designed to hold light while obscuring its source, producing controlled illumination that shaped interiors and the bodies within them. In this exhibition, illuminated window-block sculptures house painted nude Black male figures, refracted through glass and lit from above. The figures exist in a suspended state, visible yet mediated, where illumination becomes both an offering and a constraint. Light functions not as a neutral tool, but as an active force that frames the body through histories of surveillance, desire, and selective visibility.

This inquiry extends into vessel-based works that draw from the lineage of trophies. Once understood as monuments of conquest and “prizes of war,” trophies transformed domination into object form. By reworking these shapes without naming them directly, the vessels in this exhibition shift away from triumph toward intimacy, asking what it means to hold presence, memory, and embodiment rather than victory.

Together, the works position familiar forms: fixtures, containers, architectural fragmentsas thresholds rather than endpoints. They invite viewers to consider how systems of display shape meaning, and how Black male bodies, in particular, have been illuminated, obscured, or monumentalized under inherited visual regimes. The exhibition does not seek to resolve these tensions, but to hold them in light, allowing concealment and revelation to coexist, and opening space for new ways of seeing, lingering, and encountering the body.