‘Barbara Kasten: Stages’ Investigates Light and Space

Rachael McDonald

Highlights from Chicago-based conceptual artist Barbara Kasten’s body of work make their debut at MOCA Pacific Design Center late this May. Known primarily for her photography, Kasten’s persistent exploration of the relationships between light, space and color unfolds in this inaugural major exhibition.

The artist’s nearly 50-year body of work marries several dimensions of art histories and disciplines. With an educational background in both painting and textile art informing her technique, Kasten employs elements of set design, printing, painting and modernist sculpture to create intricate and elegant results. Utilizing materials such as glass, mirrors and mesh, the interdisciplinary artist brings work – that is simultaneously physical and ethereal – to life. Although Kasten is primarily known for her photography, the assemblage and result of her constructions are merely documented through the photography itself. The intangible nature of her creations is formed through physical constructions as much as by their shadows and negative space, and Kasten diligently plays with her work’s ability to be both captured and experienced. Often generating a distorted sense of scale and perspective for the viewer, the relationships between light, color and space are contorted and exposed in Kasten’s compositions.

In presenting a broad survey of Kasten’s pieces from throughout her lifetime, MOCA’s exhibit articulates the connections between her more well-known photographic works of studio and architectural arrangements and her earlier mixed media works. The relationship between Kasten’s renowned photographs of architectural structures and her earliest furniture design-based sculptures reveals her commitment to investigations of not only the relationships between light, color and space but also of the abstractions created through constructed forms. The MOCA Pacific Design Center invites us to explore her investigations and abstraction through sculptures and photographs from throughout her career.

“Barbara Kasten: Stages” is on view at the MOCA Pacific Design Center from May 28- Aug. 14 and is free to the public.