All Equations Are Wave Equations, 2019

Permanent Installation at Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Welded aluminum, acrylic with dichroic film and stainless steel.
216” x 264” x 216”

Photos: David Balch and David Humber

Press Release

New York-based sculptor Alyson Shotz was selected through an extensive three-year process helmed by Hunter Museum curators and approved by the museum’s Board of Trustees. A significant undertaking for the museum, the first major Hunter commission in years will hang in the cathedral-like, glass walled grand foyer of the museum’s west wing, overlooking the Tennessee River.

Working with synthetic, man-made materials such as mirrors, glass beads, acrylic lenses, thread and steel wire, Shotz painstakingly builds her sculptures combining thousands of these tiny parts into larger structures that capture and reflect light. Her works are spellbinding, changing with the daylight or as viewers interact with them, and often evoke natural phenomena, such as rain drops, ice and clouds. “The Acquisitions Committee was enamored with the alluring quality of Alyson’s work and felt the dynamic nature of her proposal would be the perfect complement to the grandeur of the foyer – beautiful, welcoming, always changing,” noted Virginia Anne Sharber, executive director of the Hunter Museum.

Like Randall Stout, architect of the Hunter’s 2005 west wing, who used the latest in computer technologies to design and engineer the museum’s roofline, Alyson Shotz uses computer mapping to create her intricately detailed works. For the Hunter commission, the artist’s computer mapping references paper: the first and most basic material an artist uses, the beginning of artistic endeavors.

This sculpture relates directly to my string drawings of the past four years in which I animate a plane and let it fall through space and stop the motion at various points in time. I started this series a few years ago after doing a research fellowship at Stanford University, where I was able to study their archive of Muybridge photos.   The sculpture at Hunter is based on a piece of paper falling through space. Each part of the sculpture is a different view.  Making a piece of paper into a sculpture is interesting to me, as it plays with the dimensionality of sculpture. Paper is 2d but it becomes a 3d object through this process. Also paper tends to be the first and foundational material of art so it is fitting it should be memorialized in a museum.

The title comes from something physicist, Peter Graham, said to me: “The wave is the heart of physics, all equations are wave equations”. The sculpture’s shape is defined by gravity and motion, which are described by wave equations; it is covered in a material that diffracts light into its various component parts- light is a wave; and the actual form the sculpture finally has taken is related to a large ocean wave.