Is it possible to walk into someone else’s dream? If you do, does it become your dream?
A breathtaking immersive sculpture by Toronto-based artist Esmaa Mohamoud, in the process of being installed at MSU Broad Art Museum’s largest gallery, whispers “yes.”
Imagine entering a vast, sunlit chamber with towering windows that open up like wings. Thousands of jet-black monarch butterflies, each one etched in fine detail, swarm above your head.
A young girl stands underneath the swarm, arms on hips, facing an ivy-covered fence embedded in lush foliage. The windows are barred. The pretty fence is laced with razor wire. What is her next move?
This delicate dream of freedom was slowly materializing on a gray Wednesday morning in late August, two weeks before the exhibit’s opening on Sept. 13. Dark columns of butterflies hovered in the airy heights of the Broad’s Minskoff Gallery, mounting in vertical lines suspended from the ceiling. Another swarm hung closer to the floor, awaiting final placement. When installation is complete, there will be 5,999 butterflies in all.
A team of Broad technicians, including interim director Steven Bridges and chief preparator Brian Kirschensteiner, conferred with Mohamoud on the fine points of a grandly scaled, delicate and challenging installation.
“Esmaa, did you see the sunset last night?” Bridges asked.
The artist replied, “Yeah, it was pretty reflective. I took a few photos, and I was like, ‘Well, that means we’re doing it right.’”
Reference images taped to the wall showed the sculpture from half a dozen angles, in red, pink and blue shades of sunlight.
“I wanted to create a sunset or sunrise energy, with baby blues, pinks and a little bit of orange — fleeting colors that make it all feel like a dream,” Mohamoud said.
Each butterfly is made of three laser-cut elements: the front wings, hind wings and the body.
“When I was a kid, I used to do that all the time, making model airplanes and boats,” Mohamoud said.
Monarch butterflies don’t vary much in size or pattern, but to enhance the illusion of a natural swarm, half the butterflies are 2 millimeters smaller than the other half.
“You can see the slight variation when they’re hung up, some look slightly larger than others,” she said.
Intricate holes are cut in each wing to mimic the stained-glass-like pattern distinctive to monarch butterflies, and elements are spot-welded together and hand-bent to produce 10 pattern variations.
“Doing it 6,000 times is a bit crazy,” the artist admitted.
She keeps a photo in her iPhone of herself at age 7, wearing a butterfly T-shirt.
“I broke my arm that summer and drew them all up and down my cast,” she said.
That childhood obsession with butterflies is reaching new heights at the Broad. Mohamoud knew she was on the right track when she took a photo of one steel butterfly with her phone. An insect identification app instantly identified it as a monarch, even without the aid of color.
“Complex Dreams” is the first in an ambitious new series of exhibits at the Broad, the Signature Commission Series, which will bring internationally recognized artists into “deep collaborations” with the museum.
Many artists have exploited the energized, unconventional angles and spaces of Zaha Hadid’s design in the Broad’s 12-year history, but Bridges wanted to “push the envelope even further.”
“What would it look like to really turn that space over to an artist, to dream together, to create an experience that can only be experienced here?” Bridges said.
The Minskoff Gallery’s oblique, wing-shaped window, with its diagonal stainless-steel ribs, was the starting point for Mohamoud.
“I don’t do a lot of storytelling or personal pieces,” she said. “I don’t know why. Maybe I just felt too vulnerable. But with this one, once I saw the window, it was such a unique feature. I don’t recall any museums that have this as a main feature. Usually, it’s on the exterior and not actually involved in the gallery. That’s when the thoughts kind of just happened.”
The stainless-steel fins stretching across the gallery window reminded her of a cage.
“That’s when it all kind of flooded in,” she said. “You have this young girl who is supposed to be me. She’s looking at this fence that is clearly too tall to climb.”
As Mohamoud and the Broad staff wrangled the supernumerary butterflies, one of three sections of the 18-foot-tall fence was visible in its upturned crate. The fence is festooned with intertwining leaves, with more foliage springing from the floor, all painstakingly die-cut from steel. Lush and lovely as the fence appears, razor wire lurks beneath the leaves. The surrounding foliage includes poisonous plants indigenous to Mohamoud’s birthplace of London, Ontario, including hogweed.
It’s a formidable barrier, but it has limits.
“The irony is that the fence is only 10 feet wide,” Mohamoud said. “The viewer and everyone else can see that the girl can just go around it.”
She recalled the story of a bear held in captivity somewhere in Eastern Europe in a cage 7 feet square. When activists returned the bear to the wild, it kept on pacing the same 7-foot perimeter.
“The freedom exists, but the mental blockage is still there,” she said.
The young girl at the center of the installation, looking at the fence, is Mohamoud’s first figurative sculpture.
She looked at about 40 models before finding one that looked like herself as a young girl.
The girl is resting her hands on her hips, elbows outward, giving her the form of a butterfly.
“A lot of women minimize themselves, and those barriers are no longer physical, they’re just mental,” Mohamoud said. “It takes a relearning, a retraining of the brain to say, ‘I recognize this, and I can’t let this lock me.’ That’s why we were super intentional about the width of the fence.”
When Bridges took a virtual tour of Mohamoud’s Toronto studio a year ago, the artist was nearing the end of a series of artworks set in the world of athletics. Her work was featured in “Resistance Training,” a fall 2023 exhibit at the Broad that focused on a cluster of cultural issues centering on sports.
In “Heavy, Heavy (Hoop Dreams),” a work completed in 2016, she deployed 60 solid concrete basketballs, dramatizing the heavy load embodied in dreams of basketball success for many young Black men. Many of the balls were deflated, but no less heavy, and all were meant to crumble over time, much like the short-lived prime of professional athletes.
“Athleticism was just a tool to get people in and feel comfortable having those discussions,” Mohamoud said. “The vehicle changes, but the message is the same, more or less.”
Bridges saw that Mohamoud was ready to venture into new territory.
“That got me really excited about the possibilities of working with her,” he said. “It’s exciting to join forces at this pivotal shift in her career.”
“It’s a huge honor for me to be the inaugural artist for this, and especially to reflect on Zaha’s architectural choices,” Mohamoud said. “The entire show, with the exception of the girl, is made of steel. It’s a further reflection of the institution and how many tons of steel were used to make this thing.”
The neighboring gallery, the Demmer Gallery, is home to a 2021 installation by Mohamoud that Bridges called a “precursor” to “Complex Dreams.”
Lit by a subdued orange glow that suggests a cloudless sunrise, the gallery floor is strewn with 500 dandelion plants made of black steel, each plant die-cut and sculpted by hand.
The dandelions took longer to make than the butterflies.
Each flower has five layers of petals, and each petal had to be hand-bent. Mohamoud estimates that there were 650,000 bends.
Unlike the Minskoff Gallery, with its dramatic skylight, the dandelion room is a hermetic chamber that tapers into the distance, suggesting an uncanny infinitude.
Bridges said audiences at other places where the work has been installed have lingered for 10 or 20 minutes, or even for hours, in a meditative state.
To encourage deep viewing, there are pathways through this meadow of the mind, as well as cushions for sitting and soaking up the atmosphere.
After “Complex Dreams” is fully installed, Mohamoud will return during the winter months to experience the changing light. She has already observed the changes in mood and lighting from day to day, hour to hour and even minute to minute, as the butterflies move in unseen air currents and cast varying reflections on the walls and the windows, the glass and steel ribs.
“I want to move in a space where art is felt with the body and not clinical,” she said. “I grew up seeing art that was completely clinical and not meant to be engaged with. I think we can have ‘pristine’ and ‘prestige’ while making art accessible to everybody. That’s one of my goals as an artist.”
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