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In 1968, Robert Smithson (1938-1973) created his first non-sites, pieces comprising frameworks or multi-part vessels containing collections of rocks that literally transported earth into the white cube space. Angular forms nodded to geometric abstraction and minimalism, installed on the floor so that they could be circumnavigated, in a sense, while complementary imagery nearby often indicated where the material had been sourced. Of course, just a couple of years later he would complete Spiral Jetty, his earthwork on the northern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake in which site—and indeed time and the elements—plays an integral role. Recognized as a seminal land artwork, Spiral Jetty brought the exhibition to the expanse of the outdoors.
In Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson at Marian Goodman Gallery, Smithson’s interchange between “site” and “non-site” is highlighted in a collection of drawings, plus the large-scale installation Mirror Displacement: Indoors (1969), sometimes referred to as “Dead Tree.” One of a number of Mirror Displacement pieces that involved tucking rectangular mirrors into the roots of trees and the ground, both in the wild and inside of exhibition spaces, the large-scale work includes a tree wholly extracted from the ground and laid inside of the gallery space, intersected with reflective panels.
Casting a Glance is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, who has invited 18 artists to show works alongside a selection of Smithson’s, joining him “on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.” Nature and land, mark-making and gesture, and dimension and form coalesce in an organic choreography within the gallery, emphasizing the dialectics of interior and exterior; life and decay.
The artists showing alongside Smithson approach ideas of land, the environment, transformation, and space through a wide variety of mediums, with photographs, sculptures, installations, and pencil drawings mirroring tenets and explorations of Smithson’s own practice. “His innovative conception of the site/non-site dialectic, his redefinition of what sculpture could be, and his conviction that art is a philosophical encounter with the Earth’s surface converge in this vibrant dance among the artists on view,” the gallery says.
For example, alongside “Dead Tree,” Álvaro Urbano’s Hotel Gazmira (Musa acuminata) (2025) and An-My Lê’s Fragment I: Swamp, April 17, Venice, Louisiana (2016) examine the arboreal through an entropic lens, an apposite perspective at a time when the effects of climate change continue to increase in unpredictability and intensity around the globe. Deforestation in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, for example, has been an ongoing challenge for the state—a place (among many others) where Smithson made a suite of nine in-situ Mirror Displacements. Ana Mendieta’s photos from her acclaimed Silueta Series are also a tender complement to Smithson’s Hypothetical Continents. Her “silhouettes” highlight nature’s capacity to both create and reclaim.
Casting a Glance also includes work by Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Daniel Boyd, Tony Cragg, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, Delcy Morelos, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Tavares Strachan, Adrián Villar Rojas, and James Welling. The show continues through January 24 in Los Angeles. ✧
All images courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, shared with permission.