© Josiah McElheny
On view
Cross-Collections Gallery
A Twilight Labyrinth (Alchemy),
2019
Josiah McElheny, born 1966, Boston, MA; active Brooklyn, NY
2020-14
A series of handblown glass vessels occupies the mirrored interior of a box to create an illusion of deep and expansive space. Whereas still life allowed artists to demonstrate their artistic mastery over objects by pictorially describing them to viewers, as in the paintings by Chardin nearby, McElheny’s wondrous mirror boxes allow objects to reproduce themselves through reflection. By engineering his installations to test the limits of viewers’ visual facul- ties, McElheny innovates on the modernist use of still life to investigate perceptual ambiguity, as found in the painting by Morandi that hangs nearby. As McElheny has stated, “If the reflective can be described as a medium, it is one in which the viewer becomes the author, because without the viewer it is impossible to discern the something, or even the nothing, that is there.”
Information
Title
A Twilight Labyrinth (Alchemy)
Dates
2019
Maker
Medium
Low-iron mirror; two-way mirror; electric light; hand-blown, polished, and mirrored glass
Dimensions
61 × 95.2 × 61 cm (24 × 37 1/2 × 24 in.)
box: 58.1 × 91.8 × 57.8 cm (22 7/8 × 36 1/8 × 22 3/4 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
Object Number
2020-14
Culture
Type
Subject
Purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2020.
