‘Projects 84: Josiah McElheny’ At MoMA Through April 9

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Josiah McElheny, “The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown,” 2007. ©2007 Josiah McElheny.  —Robin Holland photo, installation view of Projects 84

 

NEW YORK CITY — As part of the ongoing “Projects Series,” The Museum of Modern Art will present “Projects 84: Josiah McElheny.” McElheny (b 1966) has created a room-sized sculptural model made of crystalline glass, colored electric lights, metal, Plexiglas and painted wood.

His installation, “The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown,” 2007, is a materialization of and meditation on the writings and sketches of two glass architecture visionaries: Paul Scheerbart, a Berlin-based novelist and utopian fabulist, and Bruno Taut, the leader of a circle of revolutionary architects that emerged in Germany after World War I.

On view through April 9, in a gallery adjacent to the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor, “Projects 84” is organized by Joshua Siegel, assistant curator, department of film.

Scheerbart and Taut were proponents of the idea that glass possessed spiritual qualities that would transform and reform humanity. They envisioned a brave new world of illuminated colored-glass architecture rising out of the ashes of war-ravaged Europe. McElheny offers a contemporary perspective on Scheerbart and Taut’s aspirations and ideals, and he questions what it means to be visionary. He evokes their sublime glass utopia in his model-scale landscape of two abstract crystalline structures, “Alpine Cathedral” and “City-Crown.”

McElheny’s two prismatic glass modules are displayed on a contoured wooden base —“Alpine Cathedral” on mountain topography and “City-Crown” on an octagonal grid — and are lit from above and below by kaleidoscopic lights. By fabricating a series of glass planes whose crystalline surfaces constantly shift, shimmer and dissolve, depending on the viewer’s position and on the changing pattern of colored light, McElheny makes a unified view impossible and encourages imagination and irresolution to come into play.

Siegel said, “McElheny’s sculptural model occupies the terrain between art and architecture, the fanciful and the useful, the visionary and the real. It points to a past vision of a future paradise —Scheerbart and Taut’s utopia.”

 McElheny, who lives and works in New York, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. He has been shown in biennials at Site Santa Fe, 2001, and the Whitney Museum of Art, 2000. Solo gallery and museum exhibitions have included exhibitions at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago, Spain, 2002; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1999; and Henry Art Gallery, 1999.

His sculpture “Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely,” 2003, is in MoMA’s collection and was on view in the Contemporary Galleries reopening installation in 2004. In 2006, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Siegel has been assistant curator since 1999, and curatorial assistant from 1993 to 1999. Siegel has organized or co-organized more than 80 exhibitions for MoMA including “Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures,” 2006, curruently on view at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris  through March 2. Since 2000, he has co-organized two annual exhibitions “To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation,” and “Mediascope,” a program of contemporary experimental filmmaking and media art.

Created in 1971 as a forum for emerging artists and new art, the Projects Series has played a vital part in MoMA’s contemporary art programs. With exhibitions organized by curators from all of the museum’s curatorial departments, the series has presented the work of close to 200 artists to date.

For information, 212-708-9400, info@moma.org or www.moma.org.