Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite
The ICA’s midcareer survey of McElheny’s glass sculptures is full of “spectacular moments.”
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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
June 22 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include a SpaceX flight, Bibi pulling Donald Trump toward war, and an ICE agent looking like a bank robber
-
5 bunker-busting cartoons about the Israel-Iran war
Cartoons Political cartoonists take on Iran waiting for Pete Hegseth to leak war plans and Donald Trump's wish for a Nobel prize
-
Malaysia's delicious food and glorious beaches
The Week Recommends From 'colourful' George Town to the 'jungled interior' of Langkawi, Malaysia is incredibly diverse