Solid Light in Red Hook: Anthony McCall at Pioneer Works, 2018

Pioneer Works sits in a red brick building on Pioneer Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, built in 1866 for Pioneer Iron Works, a factory that made railroad tracks and machinery for sugar plantations. The artist Dustin Yellin bought it in 2011 and opened it in 2012 under the name Intercourse. Months later Hurricane Sandy put 5 feet of water into the ground floor and the rebuild had to start over. The space reopened in 2013 as Pioneer Works, with Yellin's cousin Gabriel Florenz as founding artistic director.

On January 12, 2018 its main hall went completely dark. Solid Light Works, curated by Florenz and on view until March 11, was Anthony McCall's first institutional exhibition in New York, and the first time his vertical installations were shown alongside their horizontal variants. 4 works were projected from the ceiling to the floor, 30 foot beams made visible by haze, next to 2 horizontal variations on Line Describing a Cone. The vertical pieces need more than 30 feet of clearance, and very few New York venues can hold them.

The series began in 1973 with Line Describing a Cone, a 16mm film in which a projected line slowly draws a circle while its beam, crossing a smoky room, forms a cone of light. At the first showing the smoke came from cigarettes. McCall, who emerged from the London Film-makers' Co-operative, put the practice aside for 20 years and resumed it in the early 2000s, using digital projection instead of 16mm film. That switch made the Red Hook show possible: film projectors were too heavy to hang vertically. "I do animations by hand, line drawings that I film frame by frame," he told Time Out before the opening, with a haze machine that "turns the light into a visible plane." And: "the advent of digital projectors allowed me to create vertical pieces."

Visitors walked straight into the forms. McCall places them somewhere between sculpture, cinema and drawing: sculpture because the volumes must be explored by a moving spectator, cinema because they shift over time, drawing because each begins as a 2 dimensional line drawing. The show closed with #SolidLightWorks All Night, from noon on March 10 to 9 PM on March 11. Pioneer Works has kept making room for art built with new technology: its Technology Residency, which gives artists and programmers lab space, engineers, 3D printers, a laser cutter and VR headsets, counts Stephanie Dinkins, Morehshin Allahyari and Lauren Lee McCarthy among its alumni.

Sources

• Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works, Pioneer Works
• Pioneer Works, Wikipedia
• A show of monumental light "drawings" transforms space at Pioneer Works, The Architect's Newspaper, February 2018
• Go see an awe-inspiring light installation at a Brooklyn art gallery, Time Out New York, January 2018
• Review: Anthony McCall's Solid Light Works at Pioneer Works, Art in America
• Technology Residency, Pioneer Works
• Thumbnail: installation view, Solid Light Works, Pioneer Works