Josiah McElheny: Towards a Light Club

Josiah McElheny explores modernist ideas of utopia in kaleidoscopic film and luminous sculpture

The Wexner Center brings back internationally known artist Josiah McElheny for an exhibition of his new and recent work exploring modernist ideas of utopia. Josiah McElheny: Towards a Light Club will be on view January 27–April 7, 2013.

A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius” grant), McElheny often combines glass with other materials to investigate and visualize complex concepts ranging from philosophy to physics. He constructs dazzling sculptures and installations as well as films, performances, curatorial projects, and even “parties,” all part of his work about the history of aesthetics. In 2005, with the support of a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award and inspired by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, he created An End to Modernity, a massive sculpture of aluminum, glass and light bulbs for the exhibition Part Object Part Sculpture. An artwork that accurately depicts the Big Bang, it was developed in collaboration with Ohio State astronomer David Weinberg.

Now, a selection of McElheny’s more recent work will be on view in this exhibition that explores the history of modernist utopias in a series of kaleidoscopic projections, narrative films, stunning illuminated sculptures and humorous performances.

Towards a Light Club is organized by the Wexner Center and will feature:
 

• A project titled The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture (2012), featuring a new film projected in an enclosed, cathedral-like cinema space with colored glass-block windows. This piece is a restaging of German expressionist writer Paul Scheerbart’s 1912 novella “The Light Club of Batavia,” which has served as a source of creative inspiration for McElheny for several years. (The novella, about the formation of a club dedicated to building a spa for bathing in light, foreshadows Scheerbart’s manifesto that envisioned how glass could be instrumental in achieving utopia.) The work was filmed at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, a 1916 Italian Renaissance-style mansion in Miami which commissioned the film. It was postproduced in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio, and features a script by Canadian poet Rachel Zolf and voiceover narration by photographer Zoe Leonard.


• McElheny’s major architecture-inspired sculptures: Model for a Film Set (2008), Crystalline Landscape after Hablik and Luckhardt III (2011), and Bruno Taut’s Monument to Socialist Spirituality (After Mies Van Der Rohe) (2009).


• A selection from his Modernism series (2010), vividly colored glass objects evoking moments within the modernist movement as it developed in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Finland.


• Three Screens for Looking at Abstraction (2012), co-commissioned by the Wexner Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which features abstract films projected on sculptures of mirror, cloth, and aluminum. Also included in the show is Light Club (2008), a film collaboration with visual artist and filmmaker Jeff Preiss.


• A set of recent performance-based pieces, Walking Mirror 1 and 2 (2012), which will be activated periodically in the galleries.

Bill Horrigan, exhibition curator and the center’s curator at large, notes, “Josiah’s beautifully meticulous work has always conveyed provocative ideas that have been central to his practice—ideas about modernism, utopia, the history of glass, and the nature of light. Our exhibition brings those preoccupations together through a dazzling variety of works in which those ideas converse with each other, including sculpture, retouched photographs, projected films, and mirrored forms. Overall, the exhibition is a kind of exploded, multi-form narrative speaking to the role of glass in the evolution of 20th century modernism.”

McElheny will be in conversation with artist Christian Marclay (whose piece The Clock will also be on view at the Wexner Center in the winter of 2013) on Saturday, January 26 at 5 pm at the Wexner Center. This free conversation serves as the Wexner Center’s annual Lambert Family Lecture.

Catalogue

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Wexner Center will produce, in close collaboration with the artist, a catalogue, also titled Towards a Light Club and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. It will feature essays by exhibition curator Bill Horrigan and Tom Gunning, renowned film scholar and professor of cinema and media studies and art history at the University of Chicago; a commentary on McElheny’s light projections by Richard Fletcher, Ohio State University associate professor in the Department of Classics; and two texts on McElheny’s work in moving image forms by two of his collaborators, Jeff Preiss and Jason Simon. In addition, the catalogue will feature the script for The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture by Rachel Zolf; a short vignette on the commissioning of McElheny’s new film by Flaminia Gennari-Santori, deputy director for collections and curatorial affairs at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens; a short fiction by McElheny himself; and individual catalogue entries for each of the objects in the exhibition, by Ohio State University History of Art faculty members Lisa Florman and Kris Paulsen, and fine arts librarian Amanda Gluibizzi, as well as by Horrigan and Wexner Center senior development officer Katy Reis.

More about Josiah McElheny

Born in 1966, McElheny has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at such museums as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and, most recently, ICA Boston. In 2010, his book The Light Club was published by University of Chicago Press, and in 2011 he was co-editor with Lynne Cooke and Johanna Burton of Interiors, a reader published by Sternberg Press and Bard Center for Curatorial Studies. A senior critic at Yale University School of Art, McElheny currently lives and works in New York City.

Andrea Rosen Gallery page for Josiah McElheny