Black on Black

1987, MIT Museum, Cambridge MA

This environment is challenging to document with images. The viewer enters a darkened room. Shapes slowly emerge from the dimness, like photographs in a developing tray. One can barely distinguish the material forms — floor-to-ceiling columns of translucent black fabric — from the columnar voids in between them. The effect is eerie, like an ancient ruin seen by moonlight. The installation engages viewers in a dialogue between what their eyes tell them and what they experience physically while moving through the space.

Materials: Black scrim, aluminum pipe, lights
Dimensions: 11' 3" H x 19' W x 43' 4" L

The experience of "Black-on-Black" is rather like stepping into a three-dimensional Ad Reinhardt picture. Beth Galston's constructions are a species of painting as well as a species of sculpture and a “participatory environment” into which the spectator steps. — Boston Globe

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Boston Globe