For the next few years, visitors to the much-loved Wassaic Project can avail themselves of a gentle pause in a pool of pure colored light, an experience of intense, meditative beauty. While the Wassaic Project is most often experienced as an exhilarating, somewhat chaotic mix of diverse and noisy visual stimulation, Liz Nielsen’s site-specific installation Crystalline Resonance makes sitting quietly its own reward.
Crystalline Resonance consists of 12 transparent photograms installed in the historic windows of Gridley Chapel. Nielsen made the images without a camera, layering colored light onto photosensitive material in a darkroom; the resulting works were mounted to acrylic. Circles, triangles, and squares stack into figures that suggest guardians or otherworldly visitors. Sunlight passes through the panels, casting their colors into the chapel like stained glass and changing the experience as the light shifts throughout the day.
Contemporary artists creating chapels is a fascinating subgenre of ambitious art: architecturally scaled works that weave together complex questions about the meaning and value of quietude, community, spirituality, and the role of organized religion in arts patronage. The Rothko Chapel in Houston is the most iconic of these. The great patrons John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create paintings for a chapel initially designed by architect Philip Johnson. The profound darkness of his paintings causes some visitors to experience the space as simply depressing. Yet it succeeds as an ecumenical place of contemplation and worship, with a library offering foundational texts from the world’s religions.
While some modernist art chapels, like Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1951), are sanctuaries where the faithful can still worship, many others, like Picasso’s War and Peace in Vallauris, use the chapel form. Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, housed in a newly constructed chapel-like structure on the University of Texas campus, takes Kelly’s lifelong investigation into pure color directly into the realm of the spiritual. In the middle of a busy campus streaming with students, the dense colors of its stained-glass windows, projected onto the walls, create a truly beautiful respite from the stresses of collegiate life.
As many small congregations can no longer afford to maintain their buildings and religious life increasingly gravitates toward megachurches, there is a growing imperative for the creative reuse of smaller churches. Nielsen, like Matisse and Kelly, exploits the stained-glass tradition. Light streaming through colored glass creates an almost irresistible call toward gratitude, joy, and, if one is so inclined, God.
Nielsen is also a master of another subgenre whose existence as a cultural tradition can seem confusing, since it contains a contradiction at its very core: abstract photography. Man Ray and his defining achievement, the Rayograph, are perhaps the best-known examples, but Bauhaus-associated modernists like Gyorgy Kepes and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, alongside Lotte Jacobi, established a tradition that extends through postmodern experimenters like James Welling, Ellen Carey, and Barbara Kasten.
Photography is generally understood as a medium that must depict the world through its very mechanism: Light passes through a lens and recreates the visible world on a photosensitive surface. Yet these artists challenged that premise, whether by dispensing with the camera altogether or by manipulating the photographic process to produce images that no longer describe recognizable objects. Nielsen belongs to the cameraless tradition, for which the darkroom process is inseparable from the medium itself. Colored light is both her subject and her material, and her work is most often experienced as a form of abstract painting, despite its photographic origins and the specialized Fuji materials that produce its rich, eye-thrilling colors.
Crystalline Resonance flirts with figuration. Each of the backlit vertical window panels can be read as a figure, some apparently sporting baseball caps. Given our history with church stained-glass windows, we might find ourselves trying to assign saintly names to these undefined stacks of geometric shapes. If these are to be understood as Stations of the Cross or a gathering of apostles, they are wonderfully playful versions of those sacred stories.
One can wager that the majority of visitors stumbling into the Gridley chapel will have at least some familiarity with meditation, and Nielsen’s gorgeous colored light will bring out the “om” in even the most secular guests. One immediately senses how wonderful the space will be for the innumerable poetry readings and concerts that will occur here over the coming years. But one’s first, and perhaps best, experience here will be when one is entirely alone, needing nothing more than a place to sit quietly and feel grateful that one’s eyes can see color.
