Keith Tyson’s work combines lunatic laboratory humour with screeds of information that stymie recollection. Everything is connected with everything, the artist suggests, and the role of the viewer is to forge the comic and complex links between the presented elements.
The acquisition of ‘Large Field Array’ (2006) for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, came ahead of the Turner Prize-winning artist’s major exhibition at the museum. The subsequent exhibition, held from 13 October 2006 to 14 January 2007, was co-curated by Anders Kold of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Hendrik Driessen of the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art. The installation later travelled to the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg, the Netherlands (10 February 2007 to 1 July 2007) and the Pace Gallery in New York, US (8 September 2007 to 20 October 2007). Each iteration of the installation was slightly different and incomplete.
The title derives from Very Large Array (VLA), a centimetre-wavelength radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico, USA. The VLA focuses on one spot from myriad viewpoints to give a clearer picture of the universe. Similarly, Tyson’s monumental modular work combines 150-300 separate sculptural forms into a single unit, functioning as an experiential lens on the world. The sculptures are placed in rows, arranged at equal intervals to create a roughly cubic array both on the floor and on the walls of the galleries.
They range from hyper-real sculptures to residues or relics of physical processes, each sculpture connected to all the other works within the field. They describe and connect various phenomena associated with our reality, which comprises evolutionary data and social patterns, mathematical proofs, bizarre substances, psychological or philosophical concepts, and cosmic structures. It is then the viewers’ job to become the lens that traces and gathers these connections and relationships to form a clearer picture. The installation challenges the myth of individualism and is an exploration of how everything is connected in the world.
