Since human experience is increasingly mediated through the digital ether, going analog is counterintuitive. Evan Holloway, a prodigiously gifted sculptor adept at playing against type, exploits this productive friction in a marvelous installation in the Pomona College Museum of Art's ongoing Project Series.
The untitled work is composed from two principal elements. A nearly square gallery is wallpapered in machine-printed sheets of black polka-dotted newsprint. Perforated steel panels painted black stand out from these walls on frames a few inches deep. That's it.
The result, however, is visually upsetting -- a physically destabilizing environment that appears volatile and kinetic, in which solid walls seem to dissolve into deep space and where moire patterns and galactic starbursts explode into view. It's an optical atom smasher made from modest means.
How it works is quite simple. You see the rows of printed dots through the steel's rows of perforated holes, which are roughly the same size. Where the holes and the black dots behind them line up, solid blackness appears.
But the holes and dots fall out of sync as you turn your head, move around the room or just stand still and let the angle of your line of vision do the work. The rest is mind-bending mystery.
Holloway has divided the room into two zones. The largest is composed of three walls holding 14 identical steel panels. The surrounding black mesh gives the room the aura of a cage or prison -- a slyly funny critique of the conflicted relationship between contemporary art and the modern museum.
The second zone is at the room's end. Holloway altered the polka-dot patterns by papering three nested cardboard disks, which are attached to the center of the wall. A disc is also cut from the perforated steel, then rotated a few degrees. The subtle change in depth formed by the stacked cardboard plus the slight twist in the surface pattern effectively break the fourth wall of this theatrical space.
With wonderful wit, Holloway shows his awareness of the audience by turning the wall into vision's literal target. (This is the place where the moire and floating dots transform into exploding starbursts.)
A productive mash-up of Pop, Minimalist and Op art, the work also has its way with Marcel Duchamp's 1920 "Rotoreliefs." Duchamp designed an absurd machine to be fitted with rotating disks sporting various designs. (A 1953 version is on view at Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum.) The optical illusions suggest falling into a deep tunnel or a hypnotic trance -- making skeptical fun of art's earnest claims to Modern Age insight.
