Naropa University Galleries

In The Thin Veil, Colorado-based photographic artist Dona Laurita presents a series of ethereal images in a multi-media presentation that explores “the thin veil” between life and death and the emotions that often follow a shattering event.

Using unique substrates, Dona’s images weave together text, lighting, and moving visuals to create an unforgettable experience. Viewers are invited to experience the depths of grief with several components along with hints and glimpses of the promises that spring brings to us—death to rebirth.

Dona turned to her art to bring her love, pain, grief, memories, struggles, and questions to life in this creative visualization. Accordingly, a very personal tragedy, the death of her beloved daughter, Julietta at the young age of 19, serves as the foundation for the exhibit yet also the stepping stone to connect with life-shattering events of all kinds. The exhibit’s abstract nature particularly speaks to everyone in this universal process of death, dying, and rebirth.

One of the major components of this visual art show is the thin veils comprised of silk with haunting and beautiful designs; some black and white; others delicately infused with color. Like a veil between life and death, the silk offers a translucent, ethereal quality—we see them but their full meaning is just beyond our grasp. They are abstract and vague based on Dona’s experiences and applicable to most of us. Some of the silk panels are nestled in wood frames. Others are placed in the front with some in the back. The frames also hold an additional notable component: Plexi with holes that all are lit with individual light sources in each piece. These signify portals and views into the unknown. 

Like windows, the portals also represent a significant dynamic of grief for many of us. “Sometimes that’s all I could do, look out windows.  I was in such shock. Hours, days, weeks, months, and now years, have passed. Windows—a portal, a place to view shadows, light, movement, stillness, a place to explore this thin veil between life and death. My new work expresses what looking out windows, seeing, not seeing, feeling, not feeling the hole or holes that exist when someone so important, integral, someone so loved is no longer here.”

Several other exhibit pieces continue this life-altering theme. For instance, often in tragedies, we feel shattered to our core. Dona exemplifies this through the Shattered Sky component. The triangles symbolize pieces of clouds falling from the sky, shattering our present reality, a reality that changes forever when calamity hits. Yet, at some time, we often eventually start picking up those shattered pieces that have fallen. The “Shattered Sky” pieces are part of a collaborative project completed in 2018 when Dona and her daughter worked closely with well-known artist, Bumbakini.  And, “Death’s Door” an actual moving door moves us into the transition from this life to the next, this reality to another one.  

For further audience engagement, Dona adds a special component: a typewriter. Inspired by a previous installation at her studio at Eldorado Springs Art Center (ESAC) in “Box Truck Altar” on All Souls Day, then and now she invites us to write messages to the other side, beyond the thin veil. What does our heart yearn to share with those dear ones who have gone before us?With this exhibit, Dona invites each of us to engage with the full emotions that accompany death and other life-shattering experiences.