LA MONTE YOUNG - Goeroe van de Minimal Music
| La Monte Young | Marian Zazeela |
| La Monte Young | Marian Zazeela |
Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she has developed a unique visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields. Light and scale are manipulated in such a way that the colored shadows, in their apparent corporeality, become indistinguishable from the sculptural forms, enveloping the viewer in the continual interplay of reality and illusion. Her work has taken the directions of performance in Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, sculpture in the series Still Light and recent neon pieces, and environment in Dusk/Dawn Adaptation, Magenta Day/ Magenta Night and her major work Light.
As artistic director of The Theatre of Eternal Music she creates the works that form the innovative visual components of Dream House, a sound and light work in which she collaborates with composer La Monte Young. Zazeela has presented Dream Houses, light installations, performances and calligraphic drawing exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Recent installations include the Pompidou Center, Paris; Ruine der Künste, Berlin; the 44th Venice Biennale; Galerie Hans Mayer Düsseldorf; MELA Foundation's "La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective," New York City and Köln Kunstverein. She has received grants from the NEA, EAT, CAPS, Lannan Foundation and Cassandra Foundation.
Under a long-term commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979-85), Zazeela and Young collaborated in a 6-year continuous Dream House presentation set in the 6-story Harrison Street building in New York City featuring multiple interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions, performances, research and listening facilities, and archives. Arts Magazine described the centerpiece of this installation: "There is a retreat to reverie as if one were staring up into the summer night sky The Magenta Lights is experienced as a meteorological or astronomical event, a changing color display above one's head, like an art equivalent of the Northern Lights." And Artforum wrote: "Zazeela transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience. The Magenta Lights is an environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has represented is the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality”.
Zazeela's one-year sound & light environment collaboration with Young, The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119/ Time Light Symmetry (Dia Art Foundation, 22nd Street, NYC 1989) has been acclaimed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as "some of the strangest and most forward-looking art New York has to offer " Her 1990 Donguy Gallery, Paris exhibition of light works was purchased by the French Cultural Ministry National Foundation of Contemporary Art for permanent installation in France. Her recent longterm installation, lmagic Light, forms a part of Dream House: Seven Years of Sound and Light, which opened at MELA Foundation, New York in 1993 and will be on view through the year 2000.
