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Email PageInfinite Space
February 16, 2007- March 17, 2007
Reception: February 16, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Alyson Shotz
Derek Eller Gallery
615 W 27th StShotz's layering of dimension and perception provokes a string of epistemological and perhaps unanswerable questions, leaving us to reckon - with our limited sight and insufficient vocabulary - some fairly weighty stuff. Does compressing dimensions, as in a work on paper, produce some more complex (and perhaps even mystical) result. Does the examination of the means with which we perceive our surroundings and which mediate distance and volume for us - lenses, microscopes, telescopes - create, in the end, yet another dimension. But however blinkered our ability to see into dimensions outside of our own, we are extended by the attempt. You must be good and dizzy from peering into things that don't concern you, Danieri tells Borges*, when the latter emerges stunned and disoriented by his look into the infinite. And why wouldn't he be, when whatever he saw lay just beyond what he could grasp? -from an essay by Emily Hall *(excerpt from The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges)
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present Infinite Space, an installation of new sculpture and digital photographs by Alyson Shotz. In this new body of work Shotz continues to explore conceptions of time and space, seamlessly fusing the organic and the inorganic as she experiments with form and light. Through her dual investigation of the molecular and the universal, the micro and the macro become one.
Shotz's glass sculpture Object in 2 and 4 Dimensions, was made using a technique developed for a commission by Memorial Sloan Kettering. Shotz traced photographs of her small sculpture on the computer to create a "ghost" of the three dimensional structure. Trapped in glass, flattened and yet dimensional and reflective, time opens up and becomes part of the object as it reflects its surroundings and viewers. The piece takes its title from Marcel Duchamp's investigations into topology that led, in part, to the creation of The Large Glass. Extending this exploration of dimensions and compression, My Living Room Rug in Hyperbolic Space, explores the visualization of infinitely negatively curved space using familiar, domestic imagery. Shotz photographed and printed sections of her living room rug, then cut and folded them into hyperbolic form.
The series of digital photographs entitled A Momentary Configuration of Matter are the latest and largest in a series Shotz has been working on for almost ten years. Published by Yale University Art Gallery in conjunction with her 2005-06 Artist in Residence Fellowship, the prints are constructed in the computer from photographs of her sculptures collaged with carefully selected images from nature (e.g. dew removed from its resting place on a spider web). These images combine to create new complex forms that could exist on the head of a pin or out in space, functioning as snapshots at moments of creation. Shotz's Small Universe sculptures of glass beads and lenses take these concepts off the page, making reference to both solar systems and atomic structures as they slowly rotate around their central axes.
Shotz has upcoming exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery and The Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been in notable exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the High Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Tang Teaching Museum, and Mass MOCA. This will be Shotz's third solo show with the gallery.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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