(already subscribe? log in).

Holt’s vision aligned with sun, earth

ART REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 14, 2012|By Cate McQuaid

A detail view of Sun Tunnels, which Nancy Holt and a crew of collaborators…

MEDFORD - The postcards for “Nancy Holt: Sightlines,’’ at the Tufts University Art Gallery through April 1, have a billiard-ball-size hole in the middle. Instructions on the back suggest holding the card up to a favorite outdoor view. I took a gander outside my kitchen window at the house next door. The circle in the postcard focused my vision on my neighbor’s window, and I suddenly saw it anew: A dark rectangle against a white ground within a dark circle. I also felt like a bit of a voyeur, and immediately stopped looking.

The experience of peering through a lens, and noting how that changes perception, is at the core of Holt’s work. She’s best known as a land artist - part of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s that brought attention to nature by making art out of the environment. The classic example of the movement is Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,’’ built in the Great Salt Lake in 1970. Smithson, who was married to Holt, died in a plane crash three years later, at 35.

Holt’s earthworks often feature lenses. The best known is “Sun Tunnels,’’ which she and a crew of collaborators installed in the Utah desert in the mid-1970s. The exhibit’s postcard image is a view from within one of these. Each tunnel is 18 feet long and 9 feet in diameter. She arrayed four of them in an X formation, at some distance from one another.

Like Stonehenge, the tunnels are aligned with the sun on the winter and summer solstices: the video and photographs show sunlight at dawn and dusk peeking over the horizon and cascading through two tunnels - concentric circular frames. Holt also had smaller holes drilled into each tunnel, forming the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. Inside the tunnel’s shadow during the day, the holes cast stars made of sunlight along the interior. As above, so below. “Sun Tunnels’’ reawakens the viewer to landscape and cosmos.

“Sightlines,’’ which was organized by curator Alena Williams and traveled to Tufts from Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, has Holt’s film of the construction of “Sun Tunnels’’ as its centerpiece.

Like many exhibits that lean on documentation you can’t see in person, the show is at times frustrating. But because Holt’s central conceptual conceit is how the lens we view the world through shapes our experience, her camerawork and audio recordings become an extension of the work itself. Indeed, much of the art on view here has nothing to do with earthworks, and everything to do with how perception is shaped. Her goal as an artist, it seems, is to act as a lens herself, to direct vision without proscribing it, alerting the viewer to new ways of looking.