Victoria Rivers "What We Invoke" exhibition Lauren Januhowski

LAUREN JANUHOWSKI WHAT WE INVOKE WHAT WE INVOKE

Behind the cotton branch of everyday life is a hidden pattern; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of that work of art... we are sealed as one fabric. Virginia Woolf - Moments of Life (1939-1940)

In 1908, under the collective pseudonym "Three Initiates", The Kybalion was published, a text codifying the principles of Hermetic philosophy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It repeats the cosmological principle of “As above, so below; as below, so above”2: the universe repeats itself in patterns, and what happens in the cosmos also happens in the body, in sleep, in the thread.

"What We Invoke / Lo que invocamos" part of that correspondence and materializes it: the thread, the fabric and the act of joining operate as a magic circle until creating the work, "A receptacle where energy takes shape and the invisible finds architecture"3 , where the memory sediments in the plot, the dream becomes structure and the very act of weaving becomes a ritual of invocation. Lauren Januhowski (1992, Houston, Texas) belongs to a lineage of artists for whom creating is also conjuring, the narrative transmission that travels through gesture, inheritance, ancestral feminine wisdom, until each piece is configured as a portal, threshold between the visible and what has no form yet.

Before the world existed, someone was already weaving. In Navaja mythology, in Greek mythology, in Norse mythology, in Hinduism, in every tradition there is a female figure with thread on her hands and the cosmos between her fingers. The Moiras cut off destiny, the Nornas spin it, and Maya, the illusion we call reality, literally means “the woven one.” His hands do not imitate the cosmos, they are the cosmos at work. Knitting and sewing is the only name that creation has ever had.

Januhowski's work manifests itself as the contemporary incarnation of Spider Woman (Na'ashjé'ii Asdzááá), who, according to the emergency myth recorded by Hasteen Klah (1942)6, designed the universe using "sunbeams and threads of rain and haze". When assembling his works, Januhowski does not perform a technique, he performs an act of embodiment of the invisible. Creation begins in the seat of thought, where the vibration of life materializes through the hands. Each knot is thought that takes shape, knowing that it travels through blood and heredity, rescuing what generational silence had guarded. His works articulated by sewing are maps where the ancestral signs and the essence of the weaver merge, portals through which the sacred story continues to flow, uninterrupted, from woman to woman.

In this ritual of channeling we find an enchantment, the female figure multiplies and fades interdimensionally in the works themselves, where its matter makes us perceive the ethereal of this world and at the same time makes visible the multitude of worlds or present that exist at all times. Time does not exist without eyes that name it we slip between the past and the present through the water that envelops all his work, and we remain suspended in some moments that seem to have happened a few minutes ago.

In that borderless space, the female figure is the portal itself. It multiplies because no dimension contains it whole. It vanishes because its presence does not belong to a single instant. It is the Changing Woman that we already knew: the one who is born, grows old and rejuvenates without stopping, the one who sews while she is woven, the one who invokes while she is invoked.

Her work goes through the multiple metamorphoses of the sacred, from the nuns and their secluded wisdom, that life given to the act of faith, to communion, “to silence that is also a form of tissue, solitude turned into a field of energy, contemplation as the only necessary technique.”9 Her own journey has led her to absorb these currents into her body, from the sacred textile traditions of Lucknow, India, to the silence of a French abbey, inhabiting the same spaces where other women, before her, wove to invoke. Lauren Januhowski thus recovers a genealogy of women who created from the margin and turned it into a center. Because the community has always been the true loom: the threads are held between bodies, between voices, between hands that pass the knowledge without anyone writing it.

"What We Invoke / What We Invoke" is the oral tradition becoming contemporary, porous to history, to the women who preceded it, to the century it inhabits. It has absorbed without losing its identity weaving center, recreates from its own perspective what others kept silent. And so the axiom is fulfilled again: as above, so below. What happened in the cosmos happened in the thread. What happens in the thread sustains the world.

Victoria Rivers Commissioner and writer.

Bibliography:

1. Woolf, V. (1976). Moments of Life, Moments of Being (J. Schulkind, Ed.). London: Sussex University Press. Trad. Andres Boch. (Original work written in 1939-1940). 2.Three Initiates. (1908). The Kybalion: A study of the hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece. The Yogi Publication Society. 3. Susan, L. Aberth (2014) Leonora and the art of invocation. International journal esoteric studies, Fulgur press. 4. Gimbutas, M. (1989). The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row. 5. Higgie, Jennifer (2025) The Other side: A story of women in the art and the spirit world. Pegasus Books, New York - London. 6. Klah, H. (1942). Navajo Creation Myth: The Story of the Emergence (M. C. Wheelwright, Collect.). Santa Fe, NM: Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. 7. Waters, F. (1963). Book of the Hopi. New York: Viking Press. 8. Allen, P. G. (1989). Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon Press. 9. Tawney, L. (2003). Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective. New York: American Craft Museum.