Nancy Holt Exhibition

Dia:Chelsea

This event has ended.

The first solo exhibition of Nancy Holt (1938–2014) to focus on her room-sized installations Holes of Light (1973) and Mirrors of Light (1974).

Holt’s five-decade-long practice included work in art, architecture, and time-based media that involved singular mediations on interior and exterior environments. Concerning the complexities of perception—focus, light, and space—Holes of Light and Mirrors of Light push the conventions of sculpture by proposing a participatory experience similar to the installation-based practices of artists such as Michael Asher, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin. The study of the circle as a visual frame, interaction of light and shadow, perceptual process, and visitor engagement in these works concretized major themes in Holt’s practice, which she continued to explore throughout her career. After observing the convergence of the specific conditions present within these two large-scale works and exploring these concepts in the landscape, Holt created Sun Tunnels (1973–76), her most well-known work in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, which is now part of Dia’s collection, as well as Dark Star Park (1984), a large-scale environmental installation in Arlington, Virginia. Dia’s exhibition will mark the first recreation of Mirrors of Light since it was originally installed in 1974.

Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938. She died in New York in 2014.