Sacred Space and Ceremony: Chris Watts at Welancora Gallery in Brooklyn

Spiritual leaders oversee religious rites because they have the power to do so, whether from study, practice, or divine dictate. New York-based artist Chris Watts is precisely this kind of initiate. He’s shaped reality with his will and traveled widely, working with shamans and craftspeople to concoct relics of resin, pigment, and more on sheer fabric. Ceremony, Watts’s first solo show at Welancora Gallery, harmonizes disparate series from his practice into a ritual.

Leveraging his opportunity to take over the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone gallery, Ceremony presents Watts’s iridescent, intensely mixed media abstract paintings alongside new standing screens that feature softer, if still enrapturing panels. These new structures, Watts told me, “have been living rent-free in my head the last five or six years.” A warm Nigerian mahogany known as sapele wood frames their dreamy clouds of color. Wall-hanging artworks watch on.