Worlds Apart: Eight Sculptors. The Lois Foster exhibition of emerging artists from New England. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University

by Robert Taylor

excerpt

...Perhaps the most striking piece--certainly the most dramatic--is Beth Galston's installation using narrow straight strips of Plexiglas and projected light. The metallic strips, suspended from the ceiling of a darkened room, cast patterns of endlessly revolving shadows while flecks of light dance along the Plexiglas foil like the sequins of a dance hall chandelier. It's not unreasonable to imagine yourself here, stepping into a purist drawing: the vertical lines lie evenly spaced on the wall, now and then intersected by spinning projected light. It's also an experience akin to entering a fun house hall of mirrors--but the mirrors are missing, absorbed by darkness, although the suggestion of their frames persists.

The work raises questions. Why is it a sculpture? To me, for all its flickering charm, it is more of a performance piece with the spectator as the protagonist. The sense and articulation of space obviously belongs to sculpture: yet the purpose of the installation is to create a mood, a romantic harlequinade of light in which volume and mass defer to atmosphere. The object doesn't exist, only our sense of its context...