BROOKLYN, NY.- Pioneer Works is presenting Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works. This exhibition marks the artist’s first institutional exhibition in New York and first time that his vertical installations are being shown alongside their horizontal variants. Requiring over thirty feet of clearance from floor to ceiling, very few New York venues can accommodate these six-colossal works. The epic vertical and horizontal installations fill Pioneer Works’ monumental main hall, which has been completely blacked out and immersed in haze.

A seminal figure of Expanded Cinema, McCall is well known for his “solid-light works.” It was a series he began in 1973 with the 16mm film Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of a beam of projected light slowly evolves in real, three-dimensional space. McCall regards these works as occupying a place somewhere between sculpture, cinema, and drawing: sculpture because the projected volumes must be occupied and explored by a moving spectator; cinema because these large-scale objects are not static, but structured to progressively shift and change over time; and drawing, because the genesis of each installation is a two-dimensional line-drawing.

To accompany Solid Light Works, renowned composer and musician David Grubbs will curate a program of Four Simultaneous Soloists to be held on January 19, February 2, February 16 and March 2. Set against the backdrop of McCall’s solid light works, the four musicians in each performance are paired with a work in the blacked out Main Hall. Visitors must actively bring each of the performers’ solo sounds into focus as an ensemble by approaching them through a succession of aural vantage points. Each performance project engages McCall’s work as a preexisting entity imprinted upon the musicians selected for their extensive experience as improvisers, including Che Chen, Susal Alcorn, Chris McIntyre, MV Carbon and Yoshi Wada.

The historical importance of McCall’s work has been recognized in such exhibitions as “Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77,” Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2); “The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies,” Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4); “The Expanded Eye,” Kunsthaus Zurich (2006); “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection,” Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7); “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image,” and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008); and “Dreamlands”, Whitney Museum of American Art (2017).

His work has also been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA New York; SFMoMA; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Serpentine Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Lugano Arte e Cultura; Fundacio Gaspar, Barcelona, amongst others.
Anthony McCall lives and works in New York.