Evan Levy at Sandler Hudson - Atlanta

On a recent visit to the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd's sculpture compound in Marfa, Tex., Atlanta sculptor Evan Levy noticed that a corner was missing from one of the 15 nine-foot-tall concrete boxes in a 3/5-mile-long outdoor art work. Studying rocks in an adjacent field, he discovered a heavy, heat-fused stone that appeared to be a meteorite, and sketched a plausible entry trajectory by which the three-inch-long meteorite could have collided with the corner of the Judd sculpture and been deflected.

This schematic drawing was incorporated into "Ennui and Asteroids," an installation in which the so-called Judd Meteorite was elegantly placed in a lighted metal box on a stand in an otherwise dark gallery space. The mirrored interior of the single-aperture box created a dizzying rank of reflected images. A peephole at the far end of the room was the only other light source; viewed in the mirrors surrounding the meteorite, it looked like the type of romantically mysterious crescent moon found in Samuel Palmer paintings. On the gallery wall immediately outside the room was an enlarged photo of the meteorite, the scale suggesting its improbably large effect.

Levy intends his hypothesis to reflect both a serious investigation and a conceptual jeu d'esprit. In conversation, he notes that the Chinati Foundation believes Judd's sculpture was damaged by lightning, yet refuses him permission to study the broken portion closely. This fortunate ambiguity allows Levy to speculate that perhaps what his gallery statement calls a "ready-made of cosmological origin" intersected the tidily rational grid Judd imposed on the landscape. Whether the culprit was lightning or a meteorite, this careful alteration of the natural world was blasted by a force of nature.

The installation's anteroom contained Levy's sketchbook, open on a table under direct illumination as though it were a sacred text. For Levy, of course, it is; the impulse behind both the sketchbook and the myth of the meteorite is the human imagination, from which art, storytelling and scientific inquiry all arise. "Ennui and Asteroids" is an adroit visual metaphor for that fact.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group