Fundamental Forces, 2011

solo exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room

Press Release

Carolina Nitsch is pleased to present Fundamental Forces, a solo exhibition of new photographs, etchings, and sculpture by Alyson Shotz, opening March 10th at Carolina Nitsch Project Room, 534 W. 22nd St, New York.

Alyson Shotz often employs scientific theories, concepts, and methodologies as a launching pad to create her work. Fundamental Forces, a suite of 6 silver gelatin prints, began as an experiment in molten glass during the artist’s residency at the Pilchuck Glass School. Alyson staged an experiment to recreate, in glass, the effects of blowing large scale soap bubble. A documentary video of this process will be on view in the back room of the gallery. The resulting massive glass tube did not survive, but Alyson brought the fragments back to her studio and projected light through the shards. The light through the stressed glass cast unique and compelling shadows on a wall, which she then photographed, thus recapturing and portraying in visual form, the intense forces of heat and light that were employed in the making of these works.

Three Views of an Object are 3 large scale etchings depicting an undulating form (from the series of drawings titled “Folded Spaces”) from three different perspectives. These prints are technically fascinating because they began as vector based computer drawings, but were then translated to the centuries old medium of etching, thus creating a kind of art historical analog/digital bridge.

Five stainless steel cubes titled Magnetic Force stand in the gallery on wooden pedestals. Clustered about on the cubes are hundreds of small steel balls like a nest of alien eggs. These stainless steel balls are held to the cubes purely with magnetic force; inside the cubes are very strong neodymium magnets that attract the steel balls on the outside.

Lastly “Frames per second”, a 16 foot wall installation of thinly sliced mirror, splits the image it reflects back to the viewer into tiny fragments or strips of vision reminiscent of frames in a film or digital bits of information. The stoppages seem to stretch time out subtly, expanding the reflection at the same time it is being sliced smaller.

Alyson Shotz’s work was recently featured in solo exhibitions at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, and The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, as well as the group exhibition The More Things Change at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She will have upcoming solo exhibitions at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, Japan. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art among others.