Pasha Rafat, Untitled, 2003
15mm argon, mercury gas tubing and steel framing
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Photo by Pablo Mason

Ongoing

Primary Forms: Illuminated and Opaque features Minimalist and Post-Minimalist works from the MCASD collection.

As squares and cubes are the basis of the modular sculpture by Sol LeWitt, so are circles and spheres the foundation for Keith Sonnier’s 1970s incandescent light reliefs that explore this medium’s reflection and diffusion. Primary forms also echo in Stephen Antonakos’ staked neon light sculpture, as well as in the hanging neon pieces of Las Vegas-based Pasha Rafat—an artist of a later generation whose work is indebted to both the rigor of LeWitt’s form and to Antonakos’ use of neon to inform and articulate space.

Two recent acquisitions of theatrical light and glass pane wall reliefs by Sonnier, exhibited for the first time, are presented with another work, their equivalent in neon. A light box by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar utilizes the same shapes—the square and circle—but now as part of a documentary piece that remains a beautiful exploration of luminosity through colored film. A two-channel video by the Mexico City-based British artist Melanie Smith completes the exhibition’s lighthearted meditation on formal variation, revealing the sheer labor and exertion behind such pure manifestations of light and matter.