Nancy Holt: Power Systems at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2024) featured the most extensive inquiry to date into Nancy Holt’s exploration of systems. Her sculptures, installations, photographic series, and works on paper consistently examined literal and metaphorical flows of power.
Holt’s earliest works employed the written and spoken word, exploring language as a system that structures perception and understanding of place. She used standard office reprographic technologies—the tape recorder, the fax machine, and the photocopier—to execute and distribute works on paper, tools that constituted the new media of her time. Making Waves (1972) charts the presence of three different “selves” throughout Holt’s day: “feminist,” “artist,” and “mystic.” Holt's characteristic method of thinking in systems to make the invisible tangible is at the core of Making Waves. In the early 1970s, Holt created audio works she called “poems in place”—soundscapes that formed pictures of her physical explorations. Visual Sound Zone: Washroom, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York is a meticulously edited series of detailed observations describing the particulars of a “defunct washroom,” as Holt called it; at the Wex, the work was installed in the art center’s washrooms.
Two years after making her first artwork, Holt began to explore photography during her travels, creating series that captured systems of signage, land ownership, and the unpredictability of weather on urban asphalt surfaces. The 1969 photographic series Texas Claims is a study of private property and nature’s refusal of borders. Holt was as interested in the built environment as she was in earthbound and celestial landscapes. A fascination with the cycles of the sun and moon, and with the sun as a source of energy, inspired her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and the corresponding film.
In the 1980s Holt’s exploration of systems focused on the fabric of the built environment through functional sculptural installations created with standard industrial materials, which she termed System Works. As Holt described, “The electrical systems light, the heating systems heat. The drainage systems drain, the ventilation systems circulate air […] the sculptures are exposed fragments of vast hidden systems, they are part of open-ended systems, part of the world.” At the Wex, Pipeline moved through the building, calling attention to the physical and economic systems that power buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The sculpture, comprising twisting steel pipes, winds down to the floor, where one section leaks, creating an incessant drip of oil that pools thickly on a white base. It points to the unspoken failures of industrialization, and the devastating consequences of unchecked audacity.
Power Systems featured the first posthumous presentation of Heating System (1984-85), a room-sized sculpture that exposes heating infrastructure. Steel pipes twist and loop around the exhibition space, punctuated by gauges and radiators, with a valve wheel at the structure’s center. Visitors are invited to turn this wheel, enabling them to control the flow of hot water through the pipes and, in turn, the temperature of the room. Inside the exhibition space a gauge on the wall records changes in temperature and humidity in red and blue ink on a piece of graph paper, meaning "the sculpture produced its own drawing, which I thought was an interesting idea.”
Holt maintained a continuous drawing practice, and Nancy Holt: Power Systems presented previously unexhibited works on paper that reveal her ideas for both realized and unrealized System Works, including Electrical System (1982) and Electrical Lighting for Reading Room (1984), both of which were on view.
Nancy Holt: Power Systems was curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, our Executive Director.
