Marking its debut group exhibition, Vela Projects introduces Mount Analogue, featuring works by Cheryl Traub-Adler, Samuel Moscou, Nada Baraka, and Tzung Hui Lauren Lee.
Borrowing its title from René Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, the exhibition is both an homage to and extension of Daumal’s metaphysical journey. In the novel, a band of explorer- philosophers search for a mythical mountain—a place said to bridge the terrestrial and the divine. This mountain, elusive and allegorical, reveals itself only to those who seek it with intention.
It must be unique, and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.
In that spirit, Mount Analogue gathers artists whose works approach nature not as subject, but as metaphor, inviting viewers to engage with the physical world as a cipher for the spiritual and unseen. At first glance, the works in this exhibition appear luminous, even delicate. Look closer, however, and they yield a deeper complexity: ambiguity, contradiction, and a quiet invitation to shift one’s way of seeing.
Mount Analogue is, in a sense, an exhibition of peradams and mystical objects from Daumal’s novel that are visible only to those who seek them with pure intent. The artists gathered here do not depict nature as it is, but as it might be: veiled, inverted, or diffused through the lens of inner life. Together, their works suggest that the extraordinary is not always hidden, it is often simply overlooked.
As Daumal reminds us, “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
