A Strange Form Overhead

Suyama Space is the lightest place to see art in Seattle. Light
falls into the gallery through long skylights. Through a circular
oculus. Through a rectangular cutout in a half-wall. It worms its way
from the great banks of windows, past desks and partitions and plants,
straight to the art in the central gallery.

One recent day, when the sunlight was out in full winter force,
Kendall Buster’s 27-foot-long, 8-foot-high cloud of stacked,
translucent polycarbonate panels suspended from the ceiling was sitting
alone in the sunshine. The gallery lighting—extraneous at that
point—had been temporarily turned off. Under the angled sun,
where the white edges crossed their perpendicular suspension wires, the
forms glimmered like Christmas-night north stars. When the gallery
lights were turned back on, the sculpture glinted in response as if
suddenly wet, like an ice floe breaking apart, as someone remarked in
the guest book. Another visitor asked, “Is this what heaven looks like?
Which level do I find my relatives on?” From another angle, in that
same artificial light, the white plastic turned opaque and shadowy. It
all depended on where you were.

This cloud—given the unfortunate title New Growth/Stratum
Model (I appreciate the desire not to be poetical, but the slash
anesthetizes me before I even get to “stratum”)—is made of a
tough solid polycarbonate rather than misty condensation, but the way
it conducts light is just as elusive. The artist—based in
Richmond, Virginia—has studied both biology and architecture. Her
installation is a landscape, a building, and a body. It relies on the
complex interpenetration of large, medium, small, and very small parts,
even if you can’t see them all in one glance.

When you walk between the two halves, look at the cut edges of the
material: You can peer down their hollow chambers and see the tiny
openings of other chambers; it’s a little like being at the far end of
a hallway in a glassy modernist building. By contrast, lie under the
sculpture on the floor and take in its big curves as flat planes.
Walking around the large room, the dimensions of the materials shift;
planes at a certain height appear as slices of white in midair. The
neat vertical grid of suspension wires becomes invisible as you focus
on the white shapes.

All this slicing and stacking without color is a way of grabbing and
mapping light, and of giving you the miniaturized pleasure of a seeming
scale model for a wild building, and of yanking a weather event out of
the sky to freeze and dissect it for you. At night, when the natural
light disappears and the gallery lights isolate the form, it looks like
a lonely pool of bones. Continuously, it changes right under your
nose.