I like writing about Luis Mora’s photographs. This is the second time I’ve done so. At first, you’re presented with beautiful images—well composed and intensely pigmented, the photographs convey the sense they were taken at the exact right moment. As I sit down to write about them, I’m overwhelmed at the layers of meaning the photographs can take on.
I find Mora’s photographs so full of life, that they have to be about death.
Writing about the same artist’s work multiple times gives me the opportunity to go a bit deeper. It also allows a friendship or collaboration to form—the most important part of the art world to me. The below forward was written for Luis Mora’s exhibition in Toronto at Clint Roenisch Gallery. The opening is tonight 6:00pm-10:00pm. The text is also included in a beautiful poster series designed by Clea Forkert that accomnies the exhibition. I highly recommend getting your hands on a set, if it isn’t already sold out.
Keep reading for an excerpt of the essay and hope to see you tonight at the opening!
Air travel is a kind of purgatory. Between your destination and starting point, you hover in an in-between state. Who you are and what you do are similarly untethered. In the air, you can shed all responsibilities and simply exist. There are no conversations that need to be had or phone calls to make—your only obligations are to watch a movie or two, stare out the window, and think.
There are two types of people who travel: those who prefer the aisle seat (prioritizing comfort and movement, ease of access to the washroom) and those who prefer the window seat (opting for aesthetics and wonder, the ability to see the world from a new vantage point). Luis Mora is very much in the latter category. During travels for work, Mora began documenting the view from plane windows. On each flight, he takes thousands of photographs, capturing the terrain between Toronto and Los Angeles, London and Toronto, and Toronto to Colombia, where his previous series of photographs, Say It With Flowers, were taken. The photographs in Window Seat, taken between 2018 and 2024, represent a transient state between destinations, capturing a universal feeling of being adrift, a physical location that mirrors an emotional state.
Every time I fly, I’m taken with how unnatural the act is. I feel close to death and uncomfortable—how does the airplane work? What mechanics keep the machine in the air? What will I leave behind? I’m full of equal parts fear and awe. I grit my teeth and watch my progress on the tiny screen, counting down the minutes until my feet are on solid ground. On the other hand, Mora embraces the discomfort of being confronted with his own mortality. “I think about death every single time I fly, and I often cry. I find a comfortable feeling in the thought that maybe I am going to die today, and I am okay with it,” he says. Mora’s photographs tug me towards a new perspective, urging me to no longer be afraid but instead accept the beauty of life, even if it means death. Mora’s photographs ask: What other way is there to live?
When I wrote about Mora’s previous photographs in 2019, Say It With Flowers, my mind similarly wandered towards death. “It feels potent that Mora chooses to focus so acutely on the flowers’ brief life at the Paloquemao market—when they’re not only in between life and death, a state of purgatory, but also floating between homes,” I wrote. It’s noteworthy, forgetting the lines I wrote previously, that I came to the same conclusion about the presence of purgatory and death in Window Seat.
I can only conclude that the acceptance and presence of death in Mora’s photographs make them compelling. There’s a rapt tension between the tranquillity of the landscapes and the instability of where they were taken. In other words, between life and death. This dichotomy is presented subtly, without fear. The result is transcendent and otherworldly. “I grew up Catholic, believing that God is watching me from above the clouds,” said Mora. “In Catholicism, it is believed that when we die, our soul flies up above the clouds. If you are good, you go to heaven, depicted as a place full of clouds,” he continued. The awe-inspiring landscapes contain a universal experience: gazing out a window and being in awe of what lies outside of it to the point that your ego shrinks down to a manageable form (for the duration of the trip, at least).
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(full text available at the exhibition)
Window Seat
July 4-7 at Clint Roenisch
Photographs by Luis Mora
Curated by Ben Freedman
Designed by Clea Forkert
Text by Tatum Dooley
Printed by Flash Reproductions