In darkened galleries, the exhibition’s opening gambit presents, among other displays, lighted crystalline webs of dazzling beauty housed in glass vitrines. Courtesy the artist spider/webs Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Seven spider frames, spider silk, carbon fibers, lights. Tomás Saraceno, Webs of At-tent(s)ion (detail), 2020. Their webs, incidentally, are antiseptic and can be used for cleaning wounds.) In fact, many of us who have read EB White’s Charlotte’s Web, an American children’s classic, are rather predisposed in their favour, seeing them as creative, literate, industrious and noble creatures. Spread across two floors (level 2 and 4) and the Shed’s vast McCourt space, it is a marvel of an art and science project (who says that science isn’t also art?) and a crowd pleaser, even if spiders creep you out (although no actual spiders are included in these presentations. The practical applications of that skill are intriguing as well as game-changing, from innovative and better building materials to illuminating the structure of the cosmos. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles Neugerriemschneider, Berlin Andersen’s, Copenhagen Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires and Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa. Custom steel, wire net, wood, light, LFE, shakers, fog. #Arachnophilia open with not able how toTomás Saraceno, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, 2022. Organised by Shed curator-at-large Emma Enderby and assistant curators Alessandra Gómez and Adeze Wilford, the exhibition takes a deep, deep dive into many things arachnid, focusing on the species’ technologically brilliant web-spinning. He was the inaugural visiting artist in 2012 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Art, Science & Technology, where he scanned spider webs in 3D using a technique he pioneered, his arachnophilia, also not merely a passing fancy, predating that stint. This is the Berlin-based, Argentinian artist’s most ambitious project to date in the US, although he has long raised the multidisciplinary bar to another level, his practice including architecture, social and environmental activism, sound, and, decidedly not least, a scientific expertise that is no mere window dressing. Happily, everyone has lived to tell the tale. Since then, it has been one of the most talked and written about shows in town. On entering The Shed in Hudson Yards, you are directed towards a desk to sign a waiver that might set off a flicker of alarm, making you wonder what you are getting yourself into – at least, it did when Tomás Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) first opened. Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s) This show is a marvel of art and science in which the artist literally draws you into his web to share his love of spiders, even allowing you to experience what it is like being one
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