アリソン・ショッツ
Алисон Шоц

Geometry Of Light

source: irausfedu

Alyson Shotz is known internationally for works of art that address space, light, and perception. Working in a variety of media, from large-scale installations to digital photography and animation, Shotz’s interest Topology—a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometric forms that remain constant despite transformation—is also evident in her artworks.

Born in Glendale, Arizona, in 1964, Alyson Shotz received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, in 1991. In recent years, her work has appeared in numerous national and international group and solo shows. In 2012 Shotz was the Sterling Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and she has also received the Pollack Krasner award in 2010 and the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007. Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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source: lightlandscapestormkingorg

As Shotz has described her practice, “I’m interested in making objects that change infinitely, depending on their surroundings. The light at different times of day, the weather…what the viewers are wearing, all these are just some of the variables that will make the piece different every time one comes in contact with it. For me an ideal work of art is one that is ultimately unknowable in some way.”
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source: guggenheimorg

Alyson Shotz was born in Glendale, Arizona, in 1964. She received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1987), and an MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle (1991). Prior to becoming an art student, Shotz briefly studied geology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, focusing on the effects and role of water on Earth—an interest that continues to influence her work. A painter early on, Shotz began in the late 1990s to integrate sculpture into her practice, which explores an interest in nature and the identity of space.

Shotz is known for manipulating synthetic materials to investigate modes of perception, experiential boundaries, and natural and scientific phenomena. She uses plastic, glass, steel, and beads to create physical structures that simultaneously comment on the space surrounding the piece, often through the transformative implementation or capture of light. In an early work, Untitled (Reflective Mimicry) (1996), Shotz donned a suit made of mirrors with flexible, mirrored wire extensions on her hands, creating a body of reflecting surfaces that extended to her environment, effectively blurring the boundaries between the perceived limits of her physical presence and the surrounding, animated landscape. In doing so, she highlighted the relationship and interaction between an artwork’s space and the viewer, which remains a uniting theme of her work. Shotz’s outdoor installation Mirror Fence (2003) likewise used mirrors to convert an archetypal white picket fence into a mirrored reflection of the changing seasons, and thus an active part of its environment. Light—and its importance in optical perception—was crucially examined in her work The Shape of Space (2004), which was commissioned by Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, in 2004. Shotz created a large, undulating, vertical surface from thousands of hand-cut magnifying lenses, with the concentric grooves of the lenses both magnifying and refracting light. Its varying density created a shimmering wall of light and shadow that captured, enhanced, and multiplied the images of its beholders and its surroundings. Later projects such as Thread Drawings (2008–ongoing) use the transformative properties of shapes and space found in mathematical topology in a physical and immediate way—thread is pinned against a wall to create physical lines and shifting shadows, exploring the dimensionality of the foundational principles of art, such as line.

In both 1999 and 2010, Shotz was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant; in 2004, she was the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting. Her sculptures have been installed in solo presentations at a range of international institutions: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin (2006); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2008, 2009); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2010); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2011), and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2012). Her work has been shown in multiple group exhibitions, including The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), and those at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2002); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008); and Storm King Arts Center, Mountainville, New York (2010). Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn.
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source: japantimescojp

Whatever the motivations behind it, the synergy of luxury brands and art is definitely a good thing for art and its enthusiasts. In the case of Espace Louis Vuitton, the venue atop the luxury goods company’s flagship store in Omotesando, this translates into a beautiful art space in a good location, and a stream of support for artists who, I suspect, are selected more on aesthetic merit than on ability to shock the public or question traditional conventions. In other words, expect a lot of nice-looking art.

The second exhibition at the new venue, which opened in January this year, certainly bears this out. New York-based artist Alyson Shotz, who has already decorated Vuitton’s Kobe store, produces ethereal artworks that endeavor to express and reveal unseen elements such as gravity, geometrical patterns and the nature of space and light in aesthetically pleasing ways.

The present show, “Geometry of Light,” named after its main piece, presents a selection of five works that make the most of the built-in features of the penthouse gallery, which itself can be described as more of a glass cube than a white one.

The title piece involves hundreds of Fresnel lens discs hanging on wires across the exhibition space. This is the type of ridged lens that was originally designed for use in lighthouses, but has now been scaled down so that you can get it in sheets or as relatively flat discs. This assemblage reflects and refracts the light entering the gallery, enhancing what is already a luminous space. There are also sculptures made from strips of laser-cut dichroic acrylic, which, as the name suggests, is able to give off more than one color. As you walk around these sculptures or as the natural lighting from outside changes, the spectrum is constantly shuffled.

With exhibitions like this, we can now enter luxury-brand stores without any pressure to buy, which oddly may be just what the likes of Louis Vuitton want.
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source: celiavintagestars
Alyson Shotz est un artiste américaine basée à Brooklyn, New York. Elle a obtenu un baccalauréat de la Rhode Island School of Design en 1987 et une maîtrise de l’Université de Washington en 1991.Alyson Shotz enquête sur les questions de perception et de l’espace avec des sculptures faites à partir d’une gamme de matériaux synthétiques comme le miroir, perles de verre, les verres en plastique, fil et fil d’acier.Dans le New York Times Rosenberg Karen a écrit: “Mme Shotz évoque des phénomènes naturels avec des accumulations de petites perles, épingles et autres matières communes … Souvent, ils relever le défi de visualiser des concepts de la physique théorique (la théorie des cordes, la matière noire).” Ses œuvres figurent dans les collections du Musée Solomon R. Guggenheim, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, le Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art et du Whitney Museum of American Art.