ART

As with any exhibition in Notre Dame de Namur University's Wiegand Gallery, your eyes will need a moment to settle when you enter Afterglow: Rethinking California Light and Space Art. The rough stone walls that line most of the interior fight visually everything placed on or in front of them. Only Kathryn Van Dyke's Knowing You Knowing Me (2001) and Chris Fraser's site-specific A Light Breeze (2010) defeat the space itself. Van Dyke offers a permeable cube, open at its four corners, whose "walls" consist of rows of small, ready-made mirrors of various shapes, gridded into loose curtains with transparent filament. The dangling mirrors may bring to mind the space-dividing beaded curtains of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96), with their slightly comic insinuation of louche decor.
But Van Dyke's curtains, from the outside, bite back at the walls, taking nips at them by reflection. From within, the curtains trigger hide and seek with bits of your own image, while the mirrors appear to punch holes in one another.

The exhibition's title makes you ask of Van Dyke's piece, as of all the others, how it represents or provokes a "rethinking" of California "light and space" art. In retrospect, the 1960s work of then-Californian artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Larry Bell, Michael Asher and Peter Alexander has been construed as West Coast minimalism. Until the 21st century the term "minimalism" was seldom associated with mid-20th century art seen as responsive to the annealing, if not annihilating, Western light and coastal horizon-consciousness.

Afterglow looks at younger generations' work - with a nod to older figures such as Lewis Baltz, Thomas Akawie and Helen Lundeberg (1908-99) - for signs of ongoing reinterpretation. The visitor leaves wondering - not a bad thing - whether the younger artists or curator Melissa Feldman or both have carried on the promised rethinking.