RIDGEFIELD, CT.- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Light, Sound, Space, a solo exhibition of site-specific sculpture by artist Alyson Shotz on view at The Aldrich from January 23 through June 22, 2005. In her most ambitious work to date, Shotz created Shape of Space, a shimmering wall of light consisting of 18,000 plastic oval Fresnel lenses that measures thirty-eight-feet long and over fourteen-feet high. Originally created for Rice University’s Art Gallery in Houston, the work features thousands of different-size ovals cut from sheets of Fresnel lens plastic by Shotz and a crew of assistants which were then stapled together. Flat on one side and ridged on the opposite side, the Fresnel lens was named for its eighteenth-century inventor Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), and was originally put to use as a lens for lighthouses in 1822. Shotz’s lenses build on the lens’s reflective characteristics by imprinting concentric circles of prisms to further bend and refract light, capturing and magnifying its surroundings.

In addition to the indoor work, the outdoor sculpture Mirror Fence will be installed in the Museum’s Cornish Family Sculpture Garden. This outdoor work is a 130-foot-long, standard-size picket fence, faced in mirror. Shotz designed the artificial structure to reflect its natural environs, so as to subsequently disappear into its surroundings. Mirror Fence is on view from November 2004 through May 15, 2005 as the third sculpture in the Museum’s Main Street Sculpture Project series.

Born in Glendale, Arizona, in 1964, Alyson Shotz received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, in 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Simple Forms (2004) at Ingalls & Associates Fine Arts, Miami; Alyson Shotz: A Slight Magnification of Altered Things (2003) at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Alyson Shotz (2003) at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions include Yard: an Exhibition about the Private Landscape that Surrounds Domestic Architecture (2003) at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Larger Than Life: Women Artists Making it Big (2003) at Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; and Mirror Mirror (2002) at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) North Adams. In 2004, Shotz received a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Painting and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Fellowship. Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn.