PAST EXHIBITIONS

GEOMETRY OF LIGHT BY ALYSON SHOTZ

SEPTEMBER 10THDECEMBER 25TH, 2011

For its second exhibition, Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is very happy to present the American Artist Alyson Shotz. While her piece “A Curve in Space and Time” has been installed at Louis Vuitton Kobe Maison since 2010, Shotz’s work is almost entirely new to Japan.

When she visited Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, Alyson Shotz was impressed by the abundant natural light in the exhibition space. The work in progress she went through to create GEOMETRY OF LIGHT was made in response to it, with a desire to offer something intrinsically new to Espace’s visitors. “What would it look like to see light stopped in time”, encapsulates Alyson Shotz starting point.

Powerfully combining long-lasting experiments with light, a deep passion for Japan, and a particular sensibility to space, GEOMETRY OF LIGHT gives us a rare occasion to better understand the uniqueness of Tokyo's sky light. The installation indeed offers to the public of Espace the best of the recent research on natural environment. Deprived of sentimentalism her pieces work at the interface of sensation and reflection on natural process, while acknowledging contemporary materials and media.

For this poetic and even sensual experience, five new artworks have been conceived for the exhibition with the support of Alyson Shotz’s gallery, Derek Eller gallery (NYC) and Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo. Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is very grateful to the artist for her complete and sustained devotion to this project.

ARTIST

PROFILE

Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For the past decade, she had created sculptures and installations for public and private spaces, working across mediums and creating new, unexpected and often striking visual perceptions. The misleading solid appearance of the floating reflections of her “Shape of Space” shown at the Guggenheim museum (New York) in 2007, was actually a very light a flexible sculpture, made of thin plastic and staples.

Interested in physics, Alyson Shotz uses industrial material, mirrors, stainless steel, to visualize invisible forces like gravity, space and light – the basic elements of our physical world. Materials that proved no less important when it comes to Art. “Questions about what the universe is made of (what is space, what is matter) seem primary to what sculpture, or art, should be about”, says Shotz.

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

She was recently included in the exhibitions Contemplating the Void at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The More Things Change and New Work, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Currents: Recent Acquisitions, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and The Shapes of Space at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, OH, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, The Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga, NY, and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, WI.

Shotz received Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the 2007 Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

ARTIST WEBSITE LINK

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

ARTWORKS

Geometry of Light, 2011

cut plastic fresnel lens sheets, silvered glass beads, stainless steel wire

600 x 359 x 157 inches / 1523 x 912 x 400 cm

work with support of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo
©Jérémie Souteyrat/Louis Vuitton

GEOMETRY OF LIGHT is the title of this exhibition composed of four sculptures, a unique wallpaper and an animation, but is the main installation of this exhibition as well.

It is primarily about the structure and dual nature of light. Light exists as both a particle and a wave simultaneously. We experience light as a sort of all over, almost invisible element, but what if we were able to see it stopped in time? What would it look like? How would it look coming towards us from long distancess? The lenses strung at intervals along a glass cord seem to stop light, focusing and amplifying it. Because our experience of space is filtered through our perception of light and our own movement, Geometry of Light also becomes about space and perception.

Views of Tokyo, surrounding the glass cube of Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo will be focused into the lenses in a repeated pattern, but changing slightly from lens to lens. The and focus will also change each time a viewer moves in relationship to the sculpture. Geometry of Light will have a very different appearance whether one sees it in the morning, afternoon or evening. Different types of light and varying weather will change the piece dramatically because light will refract through the lenses at different angles and at different color temperatures.

Finally, “The Geometry of Light” like many of Shotz’s large scale sculptures, creates an atmosphere of immersion in the art experience itself. There is a repetition and quantity of forms that create an environment large enough to move around in. However, though there is mass repetition, there are also many random elements. Every piece is unique. Each lens is hand cut, so the sculpture as a whole has a subtle human quality that is perceived by the viewer.