OLYMPIA SCARRY. Parallel Lines Meet At The Point Of Infinity

OLYMPIA SCARRY. Parallel Lines Meet At The Point Of Infinity
05.05.2019 - 14.09.2019

From my perspective,I don’t really see things howthey are. But then again nor do I not. It's as if Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle were applied not to sub-atomic matter but to the particulates of thought. The question, whether of the experiment or the picture, is how can I be in it and see it at the same time? How can art bypass the observer effect and where do parallel trains of thought meet?

Eileen Gray’s windows for the French villa E-1027 facade might suggest an answer. What she created there was in effect an impossible room divider -dividers being Gray’s first line of work and one that she continued throughout her career. Impossible because while they proposed division they didn’t effect it, they simply created an invisible line between one side and the other, between me and you. Here the skeletal structure is fleshed out in reflective museum grade glass. Three panels. Three graces. No divisions. “Transitionalstates” 2019.

“The Son of Man II” 2019 and “Seeing Things as They Are II” 2019 both glasspaintings reflective of windows comprisedof cellular like structural drawing created with broken glass. This work is a continuation of Scarry'scollaboration with the glass maker Urs Rickenbach, who realized Sigmar Polke's glass windows at the Grossmunster Cathedral in Zurich in 2009 and with whom she realized last year “Eleven/Eleven” Scarry’s first permanent and public commission in NY comprising of 22 skin toned windows at Eleven Madison Park.Scarry diagrams possibility while at the same time withholding the very point of view that such possibility typically provides with her glass works. The thing that we typically look through, we are here asked to look at.Ultimately, suggesting that how we perceive our perception of theworld into concrete structures, both literally and figuratively, may be in constant flux.Each of these works is the result of the masterful alchemy of transformation.

"Concrete As The Air” 2018is as fragile and structurally unsound as a soft copper column seen here as capable of supporting nothing but itself, not knowing where it ends and where it begins.Even the steel is suspect "Say It As It Lays” 2018, a liquid metal, a skin like chain-mail carpet version of its more familiar and rigid integrity.

“99.2% Pure Aluminum”, “98.2% Bronze” “99.8% Copper” “99.5% Steel” 2019. Metal is pulverized into powder, voided of its architectural potential, transformed into the delicacy of something that could bend and disappear under the exhalation of a breath. Perhaps all architectural castles are made of such sand?

Borosilicate glass, the same stuff used for laboratory experiments and optics, lies on the floor bound in bundles like a fibre optic cable connecting one bit of empty space to another. In “Parallel Lines Meet At The Point of Infinity” 2019 Scarry’s most recent glass work experiment, light works its wave and particle magic, transforming through a spectrum of champagne, rose and honey. The rods themselves are parallel conductors of light. Wherethey or what they communicate is perhaps anyone’sguess. Parallel lines, parallel universes. We are what we are not.

Neville Wakefield