Barbara Kasten

Kasten, Through a Glass Darkly (still), 2009.

In a city where “galleries” routinely occupy garages, storefront windows and a medicine cabinet, SubCity Projects is one of the most unusual art spaces we’ve encountered.

In 2004–05, founder Candida Alvarez presented shows in a disused elevator stuck on the eighth floor of the Fine Arts Building. In May 2009, the artist and SAIC professor reopened the gallery in another unconventional location: a 6' x 5' x 8' alcove in her Fine Arts Building studio, visible only through a glass door in the South Loop landmark’s tenth-floor corridor.

Barbara Kasten’s fascinating “Through a Glass Darkly” follows SubCity Projects’ inaugural installation, a painting by New York–based artist Joyce Pensato. When Kasten finds us peering through the door at her project, the longtime Columbia College photography professor explains she’s been studying the visual effects of light on Plexiglas. Inspired by modernist László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator machine, she made a sculpture out of Plexiglas panels, placed it on a turntable and recorded the results. Kasten projects a five-minute video of her construction onto a mirror in one corner of Alvarez’s alcove and places two mirror-image photos of the work so they meet in another corner.

But you might see something else: Kasten regards the installation as an ongoing experiment and periodically tweaks the setup. What’s unlikely to change, however, is the mesmerizing effect of the video and mirror, which fills the small exhibition space with spinning beams of light and prismatic flashes. The photos offer a closer look at the Plexiglas’s interaction with light, revealing countless scratches on the clear plastic that resemble glowing fibers, rain or snowflakes—and are as enjoyable to contemplate.

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