Josiah McElheny: The Last Scattering Surface
EAST GALLERY
April 5 – August 17, 2008






Josiah McElheny. The Last Scattering Surface. 2006.
Hand-blown glass, chrome plated aluminum, rigging, and electric lighting.
Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Museum purchase
with funds provided by Jan and Howard Hendler.
Image provided by the artist and Donald Young Gallery.


Josiah McElheny has crafted a distinguished art career out of two disparate strands of contemporary art practice: conceptual art and the studio glass movement. Deploying virtuoso glass-working techniques, he creates installations and discrete sculptures that explore crucial moments in the development of modernity, its visual and theoretical undercurrents. The Last Scattering Surface, the title of an enormous spherical sculpture composed of gleaming metal and glass, continues the artist’s investigation of modernity, joining it with the science of the Big Bang.

The last scattering surface is a scientific term describing the specific moment when the universe transitioned from opaque to transparent, when the light particles that comprised all matter and space began to disperse. The sculpture’s forms also relate to industrial design of the mid-60s, imbued with optimism for the space age. At this same historical moment, the universal linear narrative of modernity’s progress began to fracture, instigating a “scattering” of histories and viewpoints about society’s development over the ages.

The Henry will also exhibit a series of concept drawings and the artist’s first film, shot on location at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, which feature the 1965-commissioned Lobmeyer chandeliers.

Since debuting his first major installation work An Historical Anecdote About Fashion at the Henry in 1999, McElheny has gone on to produce several acclaimed exhibitions. He received a MacArthur grant in 2006.

For more information about this exhibition, download the full exhibition text:
(51.9 KB)