Where the Sky is Everything

Doug Wheeler's first solo exhibition in Manhattan creates an environment in which all form and shape disappear, and only sensation remains.

Last week the paper was peeled from the windows of David Zwirner gallery, and a basket of white shoe covers stood ready to cocoon the feet of those curious to step into the infinite. More than 35 years after artist Doug Wheeler created his first "infinity environment" for a solo exhibition at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in Milan, it has found its way to New York. In the intervening decades, Wheeler has created similar spaces in only two other venues: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1983), and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2000). This fourth infinity space is no small feat. SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (named for the place and date of both its original Italian and current American iteration) is the most expensive installation to ever be mounted by David Zwirner gallery. Recalling MoMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi's assertion that, given a large budget, he would make the architecture disappear, what one experiences with Wheeler's costly commission is not so much presence but absence.

Booties donned, the viewer is first introduced to the infinity room through its adjacent anteroom. Covered entirely in glossy white paint, the anteroom draws the viewer toward the expanded dimensions and glowing light emanating from beyond its borders. While at first the anteroom seems merely a portal to be passed through, the meticulously delineated transition between spaces — denoted by polished walls that project into the soft matte white of the infinity room and a clean gray line etched into the floor at its lip — reveals that the anteroom is integral to the piece, lending a grounding sense of counterbalance and the solemnity of a threshold to be crossed.

Doug Wheeler, <em>SA MI 75 DZ NY 12</em>, installation view. Photo by Tim Nighswander / IMAGING4ART courtesy of David Zwirner, New York — Doug Wheeler, *SA MI 75 DZ NY 12*, installation view. Photo by Tim Nighswander / IMAGING4ART courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

In the infinity room, precisely curved and fitted fiberglass wall sections, finely tuned white paints, and a meticulously coordinated combination of ambient light work to create an environment in which all form and shape disappears, and only sensation remains. In this amorphous space, light shifts imperceptibly in half hour loops, bathing every inch of one's visual field with the soft hues of dawn, the vibrating intensity of daylight, and finally, the earthy closeness of dusk. The atmosphere of the void is at once expansive and intimate. As sensory input distills, senses heighten, bestowing the act of greeting the light with sanctity and monumentality. Movements of fellow observers, the sound of breath, the warmth of the air about your face; each brings with it the awareness that we exist bound up in our own ether of perception. "That molecular mist is the most important thing I do," explains Wheeler. "It comes out of my way of seeing from living in Arizona—and the constant awareness of the landscape and the clouds."

Raised amidst the expansive horizon of the Arizona desert, Wheeler notes that, from an early age, the sky was everything. Throughout his career, the artist has sought to render fleeting natural phenomena into a palpable presence. "Wheeler's primary aim," notes critic and curator John Coplans, "is to reshape or change the spectator's perception of the seen world. In short, [his] medium is not light or new materials or technology, but perception." A pioneer of the Light and Space movement that flourished in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, Wheeler's monumental body of work ranges in medium from painting to installations, but is unified by a singular fixation on enabling people to perceive space and light in ways they normally cannot.

Perhaps in part due to the exacting nature of both work and artist, Doug Wheeler's reputation as a visionary artist has been overshadowed by contemporaries like Robert Irwin and James Turrell. "It's very hard to create absence," says Wheeler, whose uncompromising approach to making and showing his work has led him to refuse major museum exhibitions and turn down dealers such as Leo Castelli. For several years in the mid-1970s, Wheeler's intense frustration with the art world fueled the artist to support himself through screenwriting so that he could continue to make art his way. Thus, while his work has been seen on the West Coast of the United States and in Europe — where the influential Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza de Biumo was an enthusiastic supporter — David Zwirner's exhibition marks Wheeler's first solo gallery show in New York City, at the age of 72. "I never worried so much about permanence because I make things that you experience, and then it's in your mind," the artist reflects. "Most of my stuff is site specific or site-related, but I feel that's what we do in life. We have first-hand experiences, and those are the ones we don't forget. They stay with us and hopefully they're meaningful enough that they're with you the rest of your life. That's pretty much what I have always been after. I've always tried to do that stuff that has an effect on you that you never forget the first time."
If the current exhibition is any indication, experiencing infinity is certainly worth the wait. Kimberlie Birks

Doug Wheeler
David Zwirner gallery
Chelsea, New York
Through February 25, 2012

In this amorphous space, light shifts imperceptibly in half hour loops, bathing every inch of one's visual field with the soft hues of dawn, the vibrating intensity of daylight, and finally, the earthy closeness of dusk. The atmosphere of the void is at once expansive and intimate

Where the Sky is Everything

Doug Wheeler's first solo exhibition in Manhattan creates an environment in which all form and shape disappear, and only sensation remains.

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