Nancy Holt

Dunkunsthalle is pleased to present Nancy Holt: Perspectives, an exhibition dedicated to the innovative moving image work of Nancy Holt. The selection highlights her collaborative process, including a video made with her husband Robert Smithson, a video with the novelist and New York art critic Ted Castle, and a film illustrating moments from the construction of Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), a monumental undertaking resulting in her iconic earthwork initiated fifty years ago. Holt’s pivotal film and video works, beginning in the late 1960s, explore perception and systems through experiments with point of view and process. Her engagement with the built and natural environment, site-specificity and universal time, and the material conditions of perception–concerns that defined her legacy – are brought to light here through the moving image.

Nancy Holt was a key figure in the New York art scene and is internationally recognized as one of the foremost artists in the Earth, Land, and Conceptual Art movements. Her five-decade-long practice included work in art, architecture, and time-based media that consistently examines how we attempt to understand our place in the world. In opposition to other art historical categories, Holt preferred to describe herself as a “perception artist.” Across various media, her work employed systems ranging from the ecological, human, technological, and cosmological, and in ways that affirm our sense of presence and connectivity. Although she is often primarily known for her site-specific installations, such as Sun Tunnels (1973-76), a large-scale work located in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, her films and videos have become landmarks of American experimental cinema and defining features of her legacy.

Holt was deeply involved in channeling perspective and instilling a sense of place. Her early videos, including the cult favorite East Coast/ West Coast (1969) and Zeroing In (1973), underscore her collaborative process and make conscious the act of seeing through distinctive methods to deconstruct and reassemble perception. Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1978) depicts moments from the construction of her iconic earthwork ​and is both documentation and an independent moving image work. Together, the selection presents utterly current themes of ecology and the insolvable connections between all systems, macro and micro, visible and invisible.

The works on show are:

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, East Coast/ West Coast, 1969 Video, 22 mins, b&w, sound

Holt and Smithson's first collaborative experiment with video takes the form of a humorous bi-coastal art dialogue. Joined by Joan Jonas, the artists improvise a conversation based on opposing — and stereotypical — positions of East and West Coast art of the late 1960s. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid-back Californian driven by feelings and instinct.

Nancy Holt, Zeroing In, 1973 Video, 31:15 mins, b&w, sound

Positioned in an elevated vantage point, Holt uses five apertures in a black board set before the video camera to slowly reveal a controlled, abstracted view of an urban landscape. Discussing this New York vista with Ted Castle, Holt strategically transforms passive reception into an interactive exchange.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1978 Digitized 16 mm film, 26:31 mins, color, sound

Sun Tunnels documents the making of Holt's major site-specific sculptural work in the northwest Utah desert. Completed in 1976, the sculpture features a configuration of four large concrete tubes or "tunnels" that are positioned to align with the sunrise and sunset of the summer and winter solstices. With stunning footage of the changing sun and light as framed by the tubes, Sun Tunnels calls attention to human scale and perception within the vast desert landscape.

This exhibition is the first in a series of monographic exhibitions at Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run project space founded by Rachel Rossin in 2022, housed in a former Dunkin’ Donuts located at 64 Fulton in New York.

Presented in collaboration with Holt/Smithson Foundation, EAI, and with generous support from the Gretchen Bender Estate.

Nancy Holt: Perspectives is curated by Lola Kramer, and commissioned by Dunkunsthalle.

Nancy Holt (Worcester, MA, 1938 – New York, 2014) was a key figure in the New York art scene and is internationally recognized as one of the foremost artists in the Earth, Land, and Conceptual Art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades, she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and site-specificity. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions. Currently the major survey of her work, Nancy Holt / Inside Outside, is on show at Museum; Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and Holt is included in the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.