Sculptor, writer and student of glass blowing, Josiah McElheny transforms the Gallery into a hall of mirrors. Glass, light and transparency are defining attributes of Modernism. They provide the motif for the extraordinary work of Josiah McElheny, the creator of the 2011 Bloomberg Commission. His new installation is sited in the former Whitechapel library, built in 1892 as ‘a lantern for learning’. Taking light and illumination as an aesthetic and as a social project, McElheny interprets the history of abstraction as a hall of m... Read more

Sculptor, writer and student of glass blowing, Josiah McElheny transforms the Gallery into a hall of mirrors.

Glass, light and transparency are defining attributes of Modernism. They provide the motif for the extraordinary work of Josiah McElheny, the creator of the 2011 Bloomberg Commission. His new installation is sited in the former Whitechapel library, built in 1892 as ‘a lantern for learning’. Taking light and illumination as an aesthetic and as a social project, McElheny interprets the history of abstraction as a hall of mirrors. Sheets of reflective glass are arranged as multiple screens to engage with groundbreaking experimental abstract films. Refracted, distorted and extended, the moving images offer reflections on the utopian notions of light, materiality and colour in modernist aesthetics.

A student of Rhode Island School of Design, Josiah McElheny lives and works in New York. His work combines exacting craftsmanship with conceptual rigour. This major installation is accompanied by musical performances, films and lectures, drawing on the history of the former library as a centre of social reform and a threshold for the ideas of modernist enlightenment in Britain.