Josiah McElheny

James Cohan is pleased to mount a special presentation of Josiah McElheny's latest works from his renowned series From the Library of... and Island Universe.

Josiah McElheny's From the Library of Atmospheres II is the newest in his series of trompe l'oeil wall works that depict imaginary libraries housing containers or repositories for knowledge. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ confounding short story "The Library of Babel," 1941, these archives of knowledge are represented by hand-blown glass mirrored objects and a multitude of reflections. "As mysterious as the knowledge itself,” the recursive forms here are assembled to suggest that knowledge could be something infinitely expanding, something beyond containers of words or books. Appearing to be a framed, 2D image on the wall, the work in its entirety is in fact a kind of architectural intervention. Viewers peer through the frame into an illusory space, a vista of endlessly refracted hexagonal architecture, implying that each library is vast and just one of many possible collections.
 

From the Library of Atmospheres II, 2025, shows seven proxies for knowledge. Rounded and bulbous in form, these repositories suggest that they contain gases, whole atmospheres—perhaps echoing Duchamp’s famous Air de Paris (50 cc of Paris Air), 1919, a sealed, transporting ampule of captured Paris air. Surmounting these containers of proposed fugitive material knowledge are prismatic, magnifying, optically mysterious “measuring devices," reminiscent of scientific instruments like a gauge, thermometer or barometer. Together all of these objects and their endless reflections form an image of a library of information that could reveal the very substance or essence of pressures, humidities, and vapors. According to the artist, “Maybe the qualities of the mixtures of gases could be ‘read,’ if you will. Maybe they’re not only a set of measurements but actually there are whole novels to be understood or experienced in the inhalation of an atmosphere.”

Pulled from his multiverse installation Island Universe, Josiah McElheny's sculpture Late Emergence is at once a play on the New York Metropolitan Opera's Lobmeyr chandeliers and a vivid diagram of the Big Bang. McElheny collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg to create abstract sculptures that are scientifically accurate models of the Big Bang theory as well as illustrations of the ideas that followed after the general acceptance of the theory. The varying lengths of the rods are based on measurements of time, the clusters of glass discs and spheres accurately represent the clustering of galaxies in the universe, and the light bulbs mimic the brightest objects that exist, quasars. 

Late Emergence is one of multiple sculptures that have been installed together as Island Universe, an installation that calls for the decentering of human-centric thought through the concept of the multiverse, or multiple coexisting universes. In this unlikely collision of interior design and cosmology, McElheny finds a host of ideas that intersect modernity’s ruins, the history of metaphysics and abstract art to create a work of breathtaking formal beauty. McElheny's Island Universe is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is currently on view in the center of their Resnick Pavilion.