Holzer, whose text pieces often deploy advertising media such as billboards and crawling LED displays, has worked with projections for more than a decade, creating installations on the face of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao. Pale letters slip like water over parapets, curves, and windows, caressing the architecture. Just last year, Holzer began making interior light projections; this is her first in the United States.
Building 5, roughly the size of a football field, has stairs at one end, a balcony at the other, and crossbeams stretching below the peaked ceiling. The tart and imagistic poems of Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska, a 1996 Nobel laureate, sweep back and forth across the space from projectors at both ends, elongating illegibly along the side walls. (Text by other writers will be featured intermittently throughout the show.)
Stand at the gallery's entrance, and as poems such as "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself" scroll upward against the far wall, the effect is epic, like watching the opening text of "Star Wars" at an IMAX theater. You may not realize at first that you are part of the installation, as illuminated text from the other end rolls up and over your body, glaring as it hits you in the eye.
Holzer has made a landscape. The beanbags that lie ahead like beached baby whales appear to be simply more forms for the lights to stretch and puddle over. Walk into the space, and you're immersed; text is harder to read and gives way to a light show. Letters dash across the floor at you, like waves on the shore. It's a magical experience, and that's partly because of the interior setting. Unlike Holzer's outdoor projections, with this piece, the four walls of Building 5 contain the crawling lights and surround the viewer in them.
