Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas
78 feet by 19 feet 6 inches by 4 inches
Do you know how fast light travels? 299,792,458 meters per second. That equals 3,278,570 football fields per second—an unfathomable speed. Light and the speed it moves with are invisible forces that shape our experience of the world around us. Light not only enables us to see, but also has the power to impact our mood and emotions. The calming effects of soft, warm light and the energizing impact of bright, cool light are tangible to us all.
In Untitled (White, Black, Blue, Beveled), Mary Corse uses light itself to create a luminous surface on the canvas. For more than fifty years, Corse has been mixing the tiny glass beads commonly used in the white lines of lane dividers on highways into her paints. The result is a surface that appears to shift and shimmer as we move around the work. By doing so, Corse harnesses light and shadow to explore how we perceive and experience the world around us.
The Los Angeles-based artist Mary Corse is associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement of Southern California, in which artists were most focused on the viewer’s perception and participation in a work. She is best known for her minimal and monochromatic paintings which ask us to consider how the material of an artwork impacts how we perceive it.
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