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-It's a very meditative space.
It's something that kind of envelops you
because you walk into this space
and you're entering the work physically.
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The main piece in the show is called "A Beautiful Despair."
The piece actually is a laser-cut steel cube
that has a single halogen light source in the middle,
and it weighs about 300 pounds,
but it appears like it's almost floating in the space.
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So all of Anila's work
is inspired by her background as a Pakistani-American artist.
So growing up in Pakistan,
she was inspired by Islamic patterning
and a lot of the architecture,
but particularly in a lot of sacred religious spaces.
So the kind of beautiful pattern you see inside of mosques.
But in a lot of those spaces, women were not allowed to go.
So a lot of that beauty was actually hidden from women
only for the men.
So in her work,
she really is thinking about kind of that leveling.
How do we make this beauty available to everybody?
And really thinking about a line of feminism
that carries throughout her work.
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It's truly a sculpture, but it's a sculpture that has,
I think, like these legs that come out from it
because the light, if, you know,
Anila would really say that the light is really the piece.
And the sculpture, and the kind of source
are just those vehicles to get there.
But it's really how the light plays through the space,
and the shadow becomes a big piece of the work.
And then people enter the space,
become part of the work in that way, too.
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I think this is a piece that requires you to spend some time.
I think it's to come in to take it in.
I think it's to come in and walk around it a few times,
to sit in various kind of corners of the room
and be able to take it in from different vantage points.
Every time I come in, it feels different.
And I think it really is one of those things
that rewards you if you come back to it multiple times.
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