Space and place - Maya Lin, sculpture and architecture, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and other galleries and sites

Art in America, Dec, 1994 by Judith E. Stein

Eclipsed Time (1988-94)is Lin's first sculpture involving moving parts. Installed this fall on the ceiling of the Long Island Railroad's ticketing area at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, this unusual clock works on the principle of an eclipse. Passersby glancing upward see a fixed wafer of sandblasted glass, 14 feet 6 inches in diameter, that is calibrated with numbers for hours and marks for quarter-hours. It is illuminated from behind by a gridded field of fiber optics. A huge aluminum disc slowly shuttles back and forth on a track between the face and the light source, its shadow moving across the hour marks to indicate the time of day. At midnight, the two disks are aligned with only a corona of light shining around them. At noon the maximum light is visible.

Lin's work as an architect is less well known than her public art. The exhibition included a scale model and photographs of the Weber House (1991-93), a Williamstown, Mass., residence she designed in collaboration with William Bialosky. Lin drew its curvilinear lead-covered roof freehand, taking her cues from the natural forms of the adjacent Berkshire Mountains.

Another recent architectural project is the renovated new home of Manhattan's Museum for African Art (1992-93), which occupies two floors of a SoHo loft building [see p. 82]. By assembling photographic images of Lin's disparate undertakings of the past decade, the Wexner Center exhibition allowed viewers to discover shared elements. For example, Lin repeatedly asks visitors to travel through metaphorical time and literal space, and that's true of this renovation, which the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has described in terms of "a journey and a time cycle."[10]

Its design encourages visitors to take a circadian journey, descending into the lower galleries through a twilight-gray stairway and ascending a spiral passage painted five progressively lighter shades of yellow. As she had in the Weber House, Lin worked on site and drew freehand the turn of the stairs and the curves of the prominent information desk. Color is an active element everywhere, in the rich malachite stain of the floor boards. the warm mustard walls of the entry shop. and the celestial indigo of the Ivory Coast damask used as wall covering in the events room. This starry, tie-dyed fabric comes from the African region where the museum's founding director, Susan Vogel (who left in October to head the Yale Art Gallery, did important field work. Its use is but one instance of Lin's collaborations with the staff on the project.

"Public/Private" also presented 12 of Lin's studio sculptures, shown together for the first time, ranging in date from 1988 to '92. Wax, a favored material, is used additively in molded forms and subtractively when contoured toured with a heat gun. Lead is manipulated by hand, being at times wrinkled, crimped or folded. It was in these studio pieces that she first worked with the pebbly, shattered glass she used for Groundswell. While some of Lin's sculptures are untitled, others have names that may invoke emotional states and movement, for example, Slipshod and Double Run. Viewers look down into a jittery cargo of glass in Nervous, a floor piece in the form of a skinny and tapered crinkled-lead gutter. A similarly exaggerated funnel shape is the basis for Twitch, a lead wall relief fined with wax.