Alyson Shotz (born 1964) is an American sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York.Fateman, Johanna. "Alyson Shotz," The New Yorker, October 12, 2020. Retrieved July 7, 2022. She is known for experiential, large-scale abstract sculptures and installations inspired by nature and scientific concepts, which manipulate light, shadow, space and gravity in order to investigate and complicate perception.Sexton, Elaine. "Alyson Shotz, Derek Eller," Art in America, September 2009.Goodman, Jonathan. "Alyson Shotz at Derek Eller," Sculpture, October 2005, p. 75–6.Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Alyson Shotz, Artists. Retrieved July 10, 2022. Writers suggest her work challenges tenets of monumental, minimalist sculpture—traditionally welded, solid, heavy and static—through its accumulation of common materials in constructions that are often flexible, translucent, reflective, seemingly weightless, and responsive to changing conditions and basic forces.Rosenberg, Karen. "Alyson Shotz: Phase Shift," The New York Times, March 13, 2009. Retrieved July 7, 2022.Chávez, Anja. "A Conversation with Alyson Shotz," Sculpture, November 2008.Scott, Andrea "Alyson Shotz at Derek Eller," The New Yorker, March 14, 2011. Retrieved July 7, 2022. Sculpture critic Lilly Wei wrote, "In Shotz’s realizations, the definition of sculpture becomes increasingly expansive—each project, often in series, testing another proposition, another possibility, another permutation, while ignoring conventional boundaries."Wei, Lilly. "Alyson Shotz," Sculpture, May 2015, p. 75–6. Retrieved July 7, 2022.
Shotz’s artwork has been loosely grouped into three types: expansive, intricate large sculptures and installations that are handmade; minimal, self-contained sculptures that sometimes involve fabrication and elements of chance; and abstract photographs and digital prints based on photographs.Hanson, Sarah P. "Alyson Shotz," Art + Auction, May 2012.Genocchio, Benjamin. "Quiet Dazzle and Chaotic Chimes," The New York Times, March 6, 2005. Retrieved July 7, 2022. Her work belongs to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Alyson Shotz, Artists. Retrieved July 10, 2022. Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art. Alyson Shotz, Artists. Retrieved July 10, 2022. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Alyson Shotz, Mirror Fence, Objects. Retrieved July 10, 2022. Guggenheim Museum BilbaoGuggenheim Bilbao. Object for Reflection, Alyson Shotz, Collection. Retrieved July 7, 2022. and Storm King Art Center, among others. She has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Smith, Roberta. Smith, Roberta. "Guggenheim exhibit explores the forms of space," The New York Times, July 20, 2007. Retrieved July 7, 2022. Hirshhorn Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),Sheets, Hilarie M. "Turning Piano Wire Into Light," ARTnews, January 2010. Guggenheim Bilbao,Artsy. "The Line of Wit, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao," Exhibition. Retrieved January 17, 2024.Brady, Shaun. "Alyson Shotz’s newest exhibition shimmers at PAFA," Metro Philadelphia, April 21, 2016. Retrieved July 7, 2022. Wexner Center for the ArtsYates, Christopher. "Shimmery installation toys with perception," The Columbus Dispatch, February 7, 2010. and Indianapolis Museum of Art.Indianapolis Museum of Art. "Indianapolis Museum of Art announces Alyson Shotz, Fluid State," March 11, 2012. Retrieved July 10, 2022.
Education and early and career Shotz was born in Glendale, Arizona in 1964, the daughter of an Air Force pilot and a teacher. In childhood, she lived throughout the West and Midwest due to her father's career. She initially studied geology, but turned to art; science has remained a strong influence on her work. After enrolling at Rhode Island School of Design, she graduated with a BFA in 1987 and earned an MFA from the University of Washington in 1991. In the early 1990s, she moved to New York City.Abramenko, Maria. "Alyson Shotz/Investigations Into Space, Light and Matter," Nasty, October 1, 2020.
Shotz began as a painter, producing colorful images of organic forms, while sometimes integrating photography, collage and video into her practice. A foundational work was Reflective Mimicry (1996), which included photographs and a video of a woman walking in the woods, clad in a full-body suit armored in small mirrors; its play of reflected foliage against actual foliage had the effect of de-materializing the figure. She would continue to explore the blurring of figure and ground, most similarly, in large-scale outdoor installations such as Mirror Fence (2003) and Scattering Screen (2016).Dawkins, Chad. "An Interview with Alyson Shotz on Her New Work in San Antonio," Glasstire, July 1, 2016. Retrieved July 10, 2022.
Work and reception Shotz's sculptures and installations manipulate ordinary synthetic materials—optical lenses, mirrors, glass, piano strings, wire, beads, nails—in concert with physical forces in order to investigate the shaping of perception, experiential boundaries, and ephemeral phenomena.Helmke, Juliet. "The Transmuting Sculptures of Alyson Shotz," Blouin ArtInfo, February 21, 2017. She combines craftsmanship and process-intensive methods of accumulation and structure-building, often based in underlying concepts from physics, optics and mathematics.Adjarian, M.M. "Invariant Interval," Arts + Culture Texas, November 2013.Rushworth, Katherine. "Space, Light and Life," The Post-Standard, November 29, 2009. Her work produces perceptual conundrums—visual flux, spatial distortion, kaleidoscopic effects, and illusions of movement that result from shifts in light and vantage point.Johnson, Ken. "Alyson Shotz," The New York Times, April 8, 2005. Retrieved July 7, 2022.Brundage, Brita. "Reflections/Deceptions," Fairfield Weekly, March 10, 2005. They evoke both natural sensations and scientific models, while blurring the ability to distinguish human-made from organic materials.
Critics suggest that her work recalls minimalist constructions (e.g., Richard Serra), but stretches the boundaries of modernist sculpture, subverting ostensibly masculine tenets such as solidity, weight and fixity with qualities of fluidity, weightlessness, permeability and translucency; along these lines, one of Shotz's stated aims is to create volume without mass through her use of line, void, and carefully selected materials.Glasstire. "Nasher Sculpture Center, Sightings: Alyson Shotz," September 2010. Retrieved July 10, 2022. The blend of minimal and organic forms in her art has been compared to that of Eva Hesse, however, she differs in her interest in the viewer as a participant; that emphasis has been related to the conceptual work of Lygia Clark, though Shotz's entails a more optical than physical participation.
Works and exhibitions, 1999–2009 In the late 1990s, Shotz began receiving critical attention for work The New Yorker deemed "a cyberorganic spin on landscape,"The New Yorker. "Alyson Shotz," May 12, 2003. in exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1 and MASS MoCA.Johnson, Ken. "Pastoral Pop," The New York Times, August 11, 2000, p. E34. Retrieved July 7, 2022.Allen, Jane Ingram. "Expanding Space/Engaging Viewers: Mirrors and Reflective Materials in Contemporary Sculpture," Sculpture, November 2004.Mass MoCA. "Mirror Mirror," Events. Retrieved July 10, 2022. The New Art Examiner described her solo exhibition at Susan Inglett (1999) as displaying a "fascination with nature that's part childlike wonder, part humorous romp, and part clinical investigation."Clifford, Katie. "Alyson Shotz," New Art Examiner, February 2000. It included a digital photo of collaged budding flowers suggesting genetic engineering, a video, and Pink Swarm, one of two shimmering, suspended topiary- or cloud-like sculptures made of plastic, wire and clear surgical tubing.Johnson, Ken. "Alyson Shotz," The New York Times, October 8, 1999. Retrieved July 7, 2022. Covered with hundreds of tiny petals that dripped strings of goo, the sculptures evoked natural processes gone to excess.
For the Whitney Museum show "Pastoral Pop" (2000), Shotz installed Mobile Flora, a grove of 9-foot-tall, slender stalks made of Q-tips coated in green rubber with casters replacing roots, that reviews characterized as "weird, plant-machine hybrids," "alien bamboo,"Nagy, Peter. "Against Nature," Time Out (New York), August 24, 2000. and "genetically mutated lily pads and beanstalks."Pagel, David. "Reality and Irony Collide," Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2004. Retrieved July 7, 2022. In 2003, she created "Mirror Fence" at the Socrates Sculpture Park, a shimmering, three-by-130-foot-long picket fence faced in mirrors, whose slats disappeared and reappeared amid the surrounding landscape as viewers approached.Smith, Roberta. Smith, Roberta. "Impressions of the Yard, Visual and Olfactory," The New York Times, June 27, 2003. Retrieved July 7, 2022.Pratt, Kevin. "Yard," Artforum, September 2003. Retrieved July 7, 2022.
In subsequent exhibitions, Shotz presented abstract sculptures characterized as updated postminimalism "with a dash of pop science." These works consisted of accumulations of common materials that hung like drawings in space, evoking natural phenomena, invisible dimensions, and theoretical concepts such as string theory and dark matter. The Shape of Space (2004) is representative of this period. It was an undulating, translucent curtain-like form whose thousands of hand-cut and stapled plastic lenses bent and refracted light, distorting and fragmenting space to create confounding kaleidoscopic optical effects. Its fluctuating appearance was likened to a shimmering waterfall, a wall of ice, frosted translucent glass bricks, and—in its Guggenheim Museum presentation (2007), by Roberta Smith—to a "giant wind chime … dividing and multiplying its surroundings [to] provide tiny, glimmering, beveled views of the museum's rings, Central Park, an apartment building, traffic."
In shows at Locks Gallery, SFMOMA (both 2008), Derek Eller and Warehouse Gallery (both 2009), Shotz exhibited related suspended and wall-based sculptures that resembled ghostly, floating chandeliers or iced-over molecular forms (Crystalline Structure, 2007); weightless, skeletal apparitions made of long, bowing strands of beaded piano wire (The Structure of Light, 2008; Equilibrium, 2009); and billowing webs created by looping thread around pins nailed to walls in complex, mathematically based networks of triangles ("Thread Drawings", 2008).Newhall, Edith. "Photos and Sculpture at Locks: Techno Treatment by Alyson Shotz," The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 2008. During this period, she also produced collage-like digital prints sourced from photographs of her own work (e.g., the series "A Momentary Configuration of Matter"). Reviews described them as hybrid, hive-like organic structures resembling DNA strands from an artificial life form, Rorschach tests, butterflies, lace patterns and skulls.
Installations and exhibitions, 2010–