The Nasher Sculpture Center announces three exhibitions for spring 2016: the first US museum exhibition of Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens, whose work employs the use of light and its effects; Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret in a Sightings exhibition; and renowned sculptor Joel Shapiro in a show featuring recent sculptural installations and drawings.
The spring exhibition schedule runs from January 23, 2016 to August 21, 2016.
Ann Veronica Janssens, January 23 - April 17, 2016
Known primarily as a light artist, Ann Veronica Janssens is interested in “situations of dazzlement… the persistence of vision, vertigo, saturation, speed, and exhaustion”—in other words, how the body responds to certain scientific phenomena and conditions put upon it. Her ability to create these sensations in the body is contingent on the way light acts upon and within architecture and the sculptural objects that Janssens makes. Often, to further extend the desired effects of light’s various qualities, she creates environments in which she can test the science of the eye with the manipulation of light within the space, sometimes deploying fog to act in giving shape, as it were, to light. In her Nasher exhibition, the first one person museum exhibition in the United States for the Brussels-based artist, Janssens will install several sculptural works that will allow viewers to encounter shifts in surface, depth, and color, challenging perception and destabilizing their sense of sight and space.
Sightings: Mai-Thu Perret, March 12 - July 17, 2016
Swiss-born Mai-Thu Perret has spent the last 16 years making work born from a fictional feminist art commune she created called The Crystal Frontier. Set in New Mexico, the imaginary women of the commune make work that runs the visual gamut, from the painterly to the sculptural, often employing the aesthetic tropes of Modernism and aligning the women with utopian art historical movements. Her work at the Nasher will build off of a performance Perret recently staged in Geneva, which drew on the ancient Japanese puppetry form bunraku and elaborated a narrative involving a journalist, an Indian mystic, a 19th-century American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer and an artificial intelligence.
Joel Shapiro, May 7 - August 21, 2016
One of the most prominent and influential sculptors of the era, Joel Shapiro has long explored geometric form through structural compositions of rectangular elements that visually and physically challenge the possibilities of balance and weight. On view in his Nasher exhibition will be a series of recent, brightly painted, suspended forms that hover in space at different heights and angles, creating “a jungle gym for vision,” as Los Angeles Times critic Davis Pagel puts it. A series of recent drawings will also be on view, as well as key works by Shapiro from the Nasher’s permanent collection.