Alyson Shotz, “Light & Shadow”
Stockholm, 20.8–26.9 2015
Galleri Andersson/Sandström is pleased to open the new season in Stockholm with the solo exhibition Light & Shadow by the internationally acclaimed artist Alyson Shotz. In her third exhibition with the gallery, Shotz will continue her quest to understand and visualise the laws of the universe, examining the concept of light, mass and time in different ways.
A common thread in all of Alyson Shotz’s work is a curiosity for the basic forces of nature. She investigates issues of perception and space through sculptures made from a range of materials, such as mirrors, glass beads, plastic lenses, thread, clay, bronze and steel wire. Sometimes she lets chance and accidents happen to inform the next step in her process, and leaves the material and gravity to influence the final outcome. The result proves that a successful work of art can be as elegant as a mathematical equation.
Invariant Interval #4 (2014), a horizontal sculpture made of a mesh of steel wire and glass beads, will enfold and fill the largest room in our gallery. It is part of a series of similar vertical sculptures influenced by what is called the invariant interval in theories of space time. When combining the Euclidean three dimensional space perspective with time, the fourth dimension, it opens up for a non-linear way to think about space and time. Rather than being defined by mass, like most conventional sculptures, it shows volume without mass. Thus, Shotz is challenging and evolving the tradition of sculpture.
Cosmology is just one of Shotz many scientific interests, and with parallel studies in geology and art, she was from an early age fascinated by the idea of perception and the power of lenses and mirrors (through telescopes, microscopes and regular photography), and how they illuminate perception. This is evident both in the new steel curtain The Density of Air (2015) and Chroma (2013). In the latter, dichroic film makes interaction determine the colour of the art work, creating an experience in constant flux as the viewer moves around.
Also influenced greatly by living in the digital age, many of Shotz’s work could not have been made without the use of 3D software and a computer. The design of the string drawings are first drawn digitally, and then transformed physically with thread and pins. In such, they are not drawings at all, but drawing lines by the shadows created on the background. The video work The Bedroom, Time Lapse (2015) was inspired by Van Gogh’s The bedroom (1889) which he painted in Arles, and is a collaboration with music composition by Nasheet Waits, and animation work by Todd Akita. The light and shadow in the room changes along with the time of the day and the light of the seasons. At one point the room gets flooded, a direct reference to when Shotz own studio in Red Hook was flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
ALYSON SHOTZ (b. 1964) is based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (NY), Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum (East Lansing, Michigan); Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, Indiana); Espace Louis Vuitton (Tokyo, Japan); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, Texas); Wexner Center for the Arts, (Columbus, Ohio); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. among others, and has been part of recent group exhibitions at museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Storm King Art Center, and MASS MoCA.
Shotz is an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University 2014-2015, she was the Artist in Residence at University of Texas Visual Art Center and McDonald Observatory in 2013, the Sterling Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford in 2012. She received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005- 2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Shotz received her MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Her work is also represented in prominent collections such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, The Phillips Collection, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.