A Shadow Study

Light and shadow add a layer of dimensionality to public art that I love. Made respectively of weatherproof steel and aluminum, these two works of immense scale — Richard Serra’s Sequence (2006) and Deborah Kass’ OY/YO (2019) — interact uniquely with light at discrete times of day. A surreally uniform wash of color during the early morning and evening, both take on a sharper quality when the sun is at its highest. Shadow casts proudly on the works’ immediate surrounds, underscoring their unexpected presence in a natural environment and our viewing of them at a singular, non-replicable moment in time.

Here, the hardness of light echos a hardness of material: inflexible, unyielding, unbending, and impenetrable.

Impervious to, proof against, unaffected by, repellent of.