CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/6/2018

Mary Corse 'unweaves' the rainbow

"Untitled (Space + Electric Light)" (1968) is reproduced from Inventory Press's drop-dead gorgeous monograph on west coast light-based artist, Mary Corse, whose work is on view beginning today at Dia: Beacon. (Her first solo museum show opens at the Whitney in June, then travels to LACMA in 2019.) Suzanne Hudson writes, "Corse's project recalls debates around Newtonian optics. Having decomposed white light into the prismatic spectrum, Sir Isaac Newton was charged by John Keats with 'unweaving the rainbow' in his great Lamia of 1819. For Corse, the study of the physical world does not dismantle aesthetics but encourages on a shared epistemological ground the possibility of a non-disinterested position of engagement. Of course, personal observation of fleeting incidents—like water droplets appearing in the sky as some gorgeous Technicolor phantom, or a brilliant twinkling monochrome ceasing to exist and returning anew in flickering alternation—survive in the post-Newtonian world, where the development of quantum mechanics emphasizes the impact of the act of observation on the observed. Corse's paintings serve as humbling reminders of this fact." Image courtesy of Inventory Press / IN-FO.CO.