The late American artist Nancy Holt spent a lot of her time out in the deserts of North America. When she wasn’t making collaborative works with Land Art greats like Michael Heizer, Richard Serra and her husband, Robert Smithson, she was exploring Utah, New Mexico and Arizona for sites to locate her monumental sculptural installations. But some of her early experimentations happened in her New York studio.
Before her death in 2014, Holt conceived this show of her rarely seen ‘Locators’ series. The minimal-looking sculptures are made from vertical steel pipes with shorter tubes mounted on top, through which your gaze is directed on to a specific location. Holt liked how the locators could ‘zero in on things’. Here, with the ‘Locators’ positioned at eye level and at various angels, you’re invited to look on to black circles painted on the wall, a delineated architectural aspect of the gallery that you wouldn’t normally pay attention to or the pavement outside. Although your sight line is concentrated, Holt explores the parameters of perspective and the paradoxes of vision. This is experimental art that explores how perception is shaped – one ‘Locator’ even zeros in on a mirror, so you can look at yourself looking.
Providing context are a number of Holt’s photographic works. There are views through sand dunes, ancient Mayan sites and concrete building bricks. ‘Sunlight in Sun Tunnels’ (1976) shows numerous views through one of Holt’s most famous works, ‘Sun Tunnels’ (1973-76), which she made on a plot of the Great Basin Desert, the largest US desert. Each of the four concrete cylinders is pierced with smaller circular holes that relate to a specific constellation of stars. Photographed at distinct compass points, the circular frame of the tunnel remains constant while the view adapts. Holt condenses the expansive planes of the imperceptible Utah landscape into a focused view.
Through her recurrent use of circular forms that mimic organic matter like the sun, the moon, the planet and our eyes, Holt was able to control the act of looking but not necessarily what you might see. Here, the fabricated and the fixed are pitted against the natural and the unexpected.