Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Oct. 14

“At first glance,” Josiah McElheny’s glass sculptures “look like glossy interior design elements for a status-obsessed homeowner,” said Katherine Brooks in HuffingtonPost.com. But spend time at the ICA’s midcareer survey of the Brooklyn artist, and layers of meaning begin to unfold. Many pieces, like the major new work The Center Is Everywhere (2012), are born of McElheny’s fascination with cosmology and ideas of utopia. What looks like a giant chandelier actually maps a patch of outer space, with crystals and lightbulbs standing in for galaxies and quasars. As part of the piece, he displays a translation of a novel by a 19th-century French socialist that rhapsodizes about the universe’s chaotic origins. You won’t find that kind of conceptual depth at your local Crate & Barrel.

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The show is full of “spectacular moments,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. The mirrored vases and bottles in Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2005) are set in a mirrored box to create “an alluring and terrifying vision,” a “nightmare of replication” from which you can’t pry your eyes. Equally transfixing is a room where McElheny projects experimental films onto mirrored three-dimensional surfaces. An artist of ideas, McElheny creates work that challenges preconceptions—about science, about museums, about humankind’s place in the universe. He can be overly cerebral—overly interested in stale deconstructionist challenges to conventional thinking. Fortunately, his “considerable skills as a glass artist” provide his work with enough “sculptural and optical oomph” to compensate for any shortage in “felt truths.”