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INTHESTUDIO ALYSON SHOTZ INSPIRED BY PHYSICS, OPTICS, AND THE NATURAL WORLD, THIS ARTIST IS OUT TO CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTION OF PERCEPTION BY SARAH P. HANSON knew she wanted to be an artist, she wanted to be a scientist. She recalls being bowled over by the concept of black holes in her freshman-year physics course at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It was the bending of space and time, the fact that without space, there is no time… but then there’s another strain of thought that says time is happening all at once,” she says, her eyes lighting up. One change of majors and three decades later, her practice is still informed by a scientist’s wonderment and curiosity, from her afnity for chameleonic materials to her disruption of our assumptions about knowledge and the senses. The artworks recently on display in Shotz’s exhibition “Geometry of Light” at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo attest as much. The luxury retailer’s towering glass-cube gallery was dominated by the show’s namesake sculpture, a -foot-wide suspension featuring graduated disks of Fresnel lens strung on beaded stainless-steel wire. The disks—made of the same kind of ridged plastic found in cheap drugstore magniers—shimmer Y, NEW YORK ER ALL G ER ELL DEREK OTZ AND SH Alyson Shotz in her Brooklyn studio with various works YSON L in progress: a wall-mounted ; A piece in dichroic acrylic, N a beaded-wire curtain, and a white-on-white “Thread TINE LARSE Drawing,” all 2011–12. AB S Opposite: Glass beads lend L a molecular look to her suspended sculpture Allusion FT: KRI of Gravity, 2005 (detail). LE FROM ORIS LAARMAN J ARTINFO.COM | MAY 2012 ART+AUCTION INTHESTUDIO on their strands and snatch glimpses of the surrounding reverence for the geological miracles of the American West. skyline. In the daytime they suggest the roiling interior of a “Nature is such a big part of what I do,” she says. “I believe cloud in formation; at night they take on a weightier, strongly that the physical world has a lot to teach us. There opaque quality, like icicles caught in mid-melt. Shotz was are things that I see happen when I’m working with a delighted to learn that visitors would arrive and sit, material that tell me something about gravity, space, force. I’m interested in showing that idea through the artwork.” From top: Shotz’s watching as the sun crossed the sky, or return at different Mirror Fence, times of day. Shotz is preparing to reprise elements from “Geometry of 2003, which blurs It’s a neat trick for a stationary sculpture to engage Light” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where the main the boundary between negative viewers the way a lm would, but that is just the kind of sculpture will take over the enormous lobby from the th and positive space, work in which the artist specializes. Shotz has built a of this month through January , . It will be paired is on view this summer at Storm reputation for absorbing, ethereal pieces that capitalize on with a dual-channel video animation, Fluid State, , King Art Center in natural phenomena to tweak perceptions of the surrounding based on the movements of a mesmerizing sea of silver beads Mountainville, New York; the artist’s environment. Often monumental in scale, they are as and set to a commissioned soundtrack by British electronic deep interest in notable for their range of materials—glass, string, acrylic, musician Simon Fisher Turner, a self-described “one-man mapping and math comes to the fore aluminum, digital prints, and, recently, animation—as they sound clash between La Monte Young and Iggy Pop” who in My Living Room are for their thematic consistency. Shotz, who spent most of has scored feature lms for Derek Jarman. Rug in Hyperbolic Space, 2007. her childhood west of the Mississippi River, has a special Shotz’s studio of eight years in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, not far from the waterfront, is surprisingly small, considering that some of her best-known artworks—such as the clever Mirror Fence, , a picket fence fronted with highly polished aluminum that both reects and blends into the grass that surrounds it, and The Shape of Space, , a monumental patchwork wall of , Fresnel lenses that anchored a group exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—stretch to feet or more. These she often creates in pieces, assembling them on-site and adapting them as she goes; their DNA is evident in the smaller-scale artworks in the studio, which are instantly familiar though I’ve never seen them. Shotz is inclined to work in series, with slight variations, and her oeuvre can be loosely grouped into three types: intricate, process-intensive, handmade pieces; shiny ERY minimalist sculptures in acrylic or steel that she ALL G executes with fabricators; and abstract photographs ER or digital designs based on photographs. ELL A kind of cross-fertilization informs the DEREK towering inkjet prints on vinyl that she has been experimenting with in the past few years. Cherry- OTZ AND picking snippets of owers, trees, water droplets, SH antennae, and webs from her own photographs and YSON L sculptures, she digitally combines the elements into Y; A trippy, squirming compositions evocative of CAT ER scans set against black grounds. “I think of the GALL ER digital photos as imaginary structures that live in a ELL world without physical laws,” she says. “Large things can become small and small things become DEREK large; organic things sprout from inorganic things.” And, she adds, the density of the image compels OTZ, AND SH people to keep looking. YSON Clad in jeans and clogs that reveal bright pink L socks, the artist is thoughtful in describing her process. When embarking on a new idea, Shotz explains, “I look for materials that serve a particular idea or behavior. Many times I just begin to work, modifying as I go. Because much TOP: JERRY L. THOMPSON, A of my sculpture is created in unison with light and ROM gravity, conceiving it as a drawing or on the » F ART+AUCTION MAY 2012 | ARTINFO.COM INTHESTUDIO computer doesn’t always work Street station in Brooklyn when it reopens later this year. as a way of starting out.” “I really like an element of changeability,” she says, She ries the iridescent black comparing the ideal experience of her work to “being strands of a work in progress caught up in a weather event.” that hangs from the ceiling Shotz’s accessible blend of phenomenology and aesthetics like the splayed guts of a ber- has won her many plaudits. Her work is represented in the optic cable. The suspended Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim sheaf of steel wire threaded Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in with tiny glass beads reminds Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and me a bit of her instal- the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been lation Equilibrium, at Derek awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants in and Eller Gallery, in New York, , a Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in , an whose concentric curtains of artist-in-residence stint at the Yale University Art Gallery in silver-beaded piano wire took – , and, currently, an appointment as the visiting on jellysh-like shapes and artist at Stanford University’s Department of Chemical and movements from their own Systems Biology, which has commissioned a permanent piece. weight. A similar piece, Wave Born in Glendale, Arizona, Shotz had a peripatetic Equation, was featured the childhood as the daughter of an Air Force pilot and a following year at the Nasher teacher, and recreational artmaking was one of her few Sculpture Center, in Dallas. constants. Long interested in science, too, she entered A kind of motion is nearly always present in Shotz’s the University of Colorado and gravitated toward works, even in the highly reective surfaces of her glaciology—“I was fascinated by the patterns determined stationary sculptures and wall pieces. She gestures to a by soil and ice”—but found herself more at home in the new wall piece in undulating dichroic acrylic, a colorless art department. Halfway through, she applied to art lm that can be applied to Plexiglas or metal and school, enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design in refracts light in the same way that oil on water does, . She studied painting but was exploring photography producing a rainbow effect. She started working with the and sculpture by the time she earned her BFA, in . material in , pleased to nd a medium that physically Returning to the West Coast for graduate school at the encapsulated the mutability that she had been trying University of Washington, in Seattle, “I was all over to harness with her transparent and mirrored pieces. the place,” she recalls. “I was ofcially a painter, but I was The light-bending dichroic is likely to gure in her MTA making photographs, digital images, small sculptures.” Arts for Transit project for the elevated Smith–th Although such interdisciplinary investigation was » ERY ALL G Above, stills from ER Fluid State, 2011, ELL a video animation Shotz made with Todd Akita that will DEREK open this month at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, OTZ, AND along with the SH Fresnel-lens instal- YSON lation Geometry of L Light, 2011, seen at right with Tran- sitional Object, EYRAT, A Figure #1, 2010, UT and the mural- size digital print MIE SO Coalescent, 2011, RE at the Espace Y; JE Louis Vuitton in ER Tokyo last year.

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