Joanna Tam Plumbs the Ocean in “when blue meets blue”

This is how it feels to find it—there’s a flow. Across from the 1 bus stop in Harvard Square is Behind VA Shadows, a gallery only viewable from the outside. Go from left to right down the block, starting at the locked door. See yourself in the window, bobbing into focus? There I am. Here I am blue, the blue pooling out of the eight panes of glass that enclose images of the ocean. Artist Joanna Tam’s solo show, “when blue meets blue,” washes over Linden Street.

Informed by Tam’s photography of the ocean, the installation comprises photographic prints, collage, photography printed on paper and fabric, and poetry. Part of a color-focused curatorial project by Behind VA Shadows founder Yolanda He Yang, Tam presents the ocean as a blue place. That is, Tam’s ocean is a melancholic and reflective site of connection to past identity, to others, to nature, rooted in her experience as a migrant from Hong Kong. To begin, from the left, a piece of chiffon orients the viewer, the sea printed upon it, draped perpendicular to the ground. Then, to the right of one of Tam’s photographs of the ocean, chiffon reappears in the second panel, hanging obliquely upward and to the right, anchored by a jar of gray stones each wrapped in blue twine. There is comfort here, and surrender: The material is familiar yet dark, inscrutable at points, like the water. To be sheer is not the same thing as to be transparent.

More photographs surround the fabric and stones and extend leftward across the gallery windows: the ocean on paper printed and crumpled, on paper printed and folded into airplanes. Tam’s collection reflects how the ocean is a site where memory and the ambivalent relationship of humanity to nature enfold. A few feet along the street, and in the rush of Harvard Square, it would take only seconds to take in the entirety of the show, but by providing seascapes, Tam calls for more reflection, a slower current—if not on the reflective surfaces of the water, then in the glass that delineates them from the viewer.

An aberration comes in the form of a poem by the Haitian poet blu, superimposed over the penultimate pane of glass. blu offers an image of the ocean that is as emotionally fluid as Tam’s surfaces. “The sea stretches far to catch you,” the poem refrains. One interpretation could be that even as we drift we remain tethered to the water. It is poetically ambiguous, though: The sea stretches far to catch you what? Tam’s oceans contain this poetic ambiguity too: A birds-eye triptych of the surface of water (presumably against a beach) closes the installation by shifting our vantage. Still, it is unclear whether if we had a horizon view, the water would drown the telephone pole we see reflected in its surface, or the viewer. 

But it is not a deluge. The installation spills quietly, held in resonant (surface) tension for the viewer. Tam’s “when blue meets blue” provides a shifting blue site that waxes and drips poetic, then recedes. 

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“when blue meets blue” is on view through May 16, 2026, at Behind VA Shadows, 2 Linden Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA.

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This review was written by a fellow of the 2026 Boston Art Writing Fellowship, a partnership between Praise Shadows Art Gallery and Boston Art Review designed to offer an introduction to curatorial work and sharpen the critical skills of writing, editing, and storytelling in the contemporary art landscape.