What does it mean to notice how we see? Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in Los Angeles brings Nancy Holt’s study of perception into a close conversation with the site. Here, light, sound, language, and movement meet as parallel systems for organizing perception.

Across five decades, Nancy Holt developed a body of work concerned with how we locate ourselves physically and perceptually within space. Holt consistently returned to questions of orientation: how attention is guided, how environments are read, and how perception is shaped by context. R.M. Schindler’s Kings Road House (1921-22), with its pinwheel plan, constructed of slab-tilt concrete and conceived to integrate interior and exterior space, is a setting that resonates with these concerns. Installed throughout the house, Holt’s works sharpen awareness of how perception is framed and directed. 

In the Marian Chace Studio, California Sun Signs (1972) reflects Holt’s attention to language embedded in the built environment.  The Pauline Schindler Studio is dedicated to Holt’s Light and Shadow Photo Drawings (1978), a group of twenty-two works that register light and shadow as material presences rather than ephemeral effects. In the R. M. Schindler Studio, two early photographic works—Concrete Visions (1967) and Concrete Poem (1968)—reflect Holt’s sustained engagement with concrete as both a material and a metaphor, linking her practice to the architectural language of the house itself.

The Clyde Chace Studio is devoted to Sun Tunnels, presenting the eponymous 1978 film alongside Sunlight in Sun Tunnels (1976) and a selection from her Sun Tunnels photo studies  (1975).  On completing the artwork in 1976, she drove solo from Salt Lake City to New York City along Interstate 80, recording herself as she tuned the radio and described what appeared along the road. The resultant audiowork U.S. 80 SOLO: Nebraska captures the particular state of awareness produced by long-distance driving.