Olafur Eliasson
“Your ocular relief”
New York, 521 West 21st Street
Since the early 1990s, Eliasson’s practice has concentrated around the investigation of perception, often using natural phenomena to heighten our understanding of each other and our surroundings. Your ocular relief continues Eliasson’s long-standing investigation of the cognitive and cultural conditions of perception, seeking to offer an alternative to the current pressures that shape our existence.
In the darkened space of the main gallery, Your ocular relief, 2021, the show’s eponymous artwork, unfurls before the viewer as an evocative light show of shapes, colors, and shadows. The ever-changing sequence develops and vanishes upon a large curved screen, behind which the viewer can glimpse the apparatuses responsible for it. An orchestra of lenses, prisms, mirrors, and color-effect filters slowly rotate within the beams of five spotlights. The light from the spotlights is broken apart and transformed through reflection and refraction into the sequences visible on the screen. As each apparatus revolves at a different pace, the relationship between the various sequences is constantly changing, always new. These lenses form at once the material for the exhibition and its conceptual inspiration. Most of the lenses featured here are from Eliasson’s own collection or are recycled from previous artworks and experiments that have taken place in the artist’s Berlin studio.
EDGY BUT PERFECT KINSHIP SPHERE, 2020 Color-effect filter glass (pink), color glass (green), stainless steel, LED system Diameter: 43 1/4 inches; 110 cm
Eliasson has long been fascinated with optical devices and has collected all sorts of lenses over the years as part of his investigation into perception and the qualities of light. “We live in an age of the proliferation of lenses,” the artist says, “not only in the surveillance cameras that pepper our urban space, but also in the hands of activists who are aiming them back at the instruments of power. Through recent conversations with the art historian Gloria Sutton, among others, I have become intrigued by the notion of the ‘ocular,’ as we progress beyond the single-gaze of the panopticon to the decentralization of the authority of the lens. Today, many of us now carry lenses with us through our various devices, so the question arises—who is the owner of the narrative?”
In Your ocular relief, 2021, the lenses are divorced from their potential for use in observation and recording and are taken as material to create something of beauty, what the artist refers to as a radically analogue film, dependent upon the physical encounter between viewer and artwork in the here and now. The origin of the light can be seen, as can the objects that produce the images; cause and effect are directly on display. The lens flares at the center of the work are also stubbornly analogue. In films, a flare is an error or residue, a waste product. Resulting from the physics of the lens, it is generally undesired. Here it is transformed into the central element to be explored in all its possibilities.
YOUR OCULAR RELIEF, 2021 Projection screen, aluminium stands, LED projectors with optical components, lens enclosures with integrated motors, electrical ballasts, control units 8' 10" x 32' 10" x 15' 5"; 2.7m x 10.0m x 4.7m
For the last decade, Eliasson has created glass works and watercolors inspired by the themes of color, transparency, and layering. He has long been fascinated by the visual ambiguity created by the ellipse, a shape that can appear either two-dimensional or as a circle viewed in perspective, depending on its context. For Mirror my calmness Buddha in me, 2021, colorful panes of silvered, hand-blown glass are arranged to suggest transparent, overlapping circles and ellipses. To him these are the simplest means for achieving a non-representational illusion of depth and movement in two dimensions, an alternative to the orthogonal conventions of Western perspective.
