Tag: immersive

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Pace Gallery

In the middle of Chelsea’s bustling Pace Gallery, it comes as a surprise to hear your own heartbeat filling the cavernous room housing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation ‘Pulse Topology.’  Placing your hand under one of three small monitor suspended from the ceiling not only broadcasts the sound of your heartbeat but translates it into flashing lights in one of thousands of lightbulbs suspended in an undulating pattern from the ceiling.  Though essential to life, we often take our beating hearts for granted; making them the focus of an artwork not only flips interior functions to the exterior, it speaks to something visitors have in common.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Topology, 2021, 3,000 LED filament lightbulbs, DMX controllers, custom-made photoplethysmography sensors, computers, covers any area between 1,000 and 5,000 square feet.

Tomas Saraceno at The Shed

This web is a tiny part of Tomas Saraceno’s current show at The Shed in Hudson Yards, but like the rest of the exhibition, it elicits wonder at the natural world, prompting greater respect for the web of interspecies relationships around us.  Housed behind glass and spot lit from below, webs created by various species of spiders in Saraceno’s Berlin studio demonstrate the arthropods’ ability to communicate and understand the world around them through motion perceived via webs.  Elsewhere in the show, visitors are invited to physically enter a version of a web in the immersive installation ‘Free the Air:  How to hear the universe in a spider/web’ by settling on a web of wire mesh netting to listen to a soundtrack that translates spider movements into sound.  (On view at The Shed through April 17th).

Tomas Saraceno, installation view (detail) of ‘Webs of At-tent(s)ion,’ spider frames, spider silk, carbon fibers, lights, 2020.

 

Peter Halley at Greene Naftali Gallery

Inspired by the city grid, jail cell windows, high-rise buildings and other structures designed to regulate and control human activity, Peter Halley’s Neo-Geo abstraction has exceeded into own regulatory bounds in a dramatic, maze-like installation at Chelsea’s Greene Naftali Gallery.  Up and down stairs, around blind bends and through an eye-popping assault of day-glo color, visitors find their way through an environment that feels as if we’d stepped into one of Halley’s paintings.  Here, a painting composed of stacked forms has an altar-like presence at the top of a vividly green staircase.  (On view through Dec 20th).

Peter Halley, installation view of ‘Heterotopia II’ at Greene Naftali Gallery, Nov 2019.

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Ever aware of the evolving role of images as stand-ins for real objects in the digital era, Sarah Sze creates a wave in the form of photos, video and rotating projections at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.  Titled ‘Crescent (Timekeeper),’ the installation displays fragmentary glimpses of the natural world on a rickety but orderly wooden frame.  Visitors who step close to explore a coyote crossing a road, a raging flame or a bird in flight experience a dynamic and evolving sculpture that offers an immersive experience in real time.  (On view in Chelsea through Oct 19th).

Sarah Sze, Crescent (Timekeeper), mixed media, wood, stainless steel, acrylic, video projectors, archival pigment prints, ceramic and tape, dimensions variable, 2019.

Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper Gallery

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video of collaged clock-related film clips from 2010 was so engaging that his subsequent photo projects and onomatopoeia paintings have sometimes seemed bland by comparison. The standout piece in his latest solo show at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery corrects that trend, however, by animating words from cartoons in an eye-popping immersive installation that, though soundless, communicates loudly. (Through Oct 17th).

Installation view of Christian Marclay’s ‘Surround Sounds,’ at Paula Cooper Gallery, September 2015.