* Island Universe

NNew York artist Josiah McElheny's installation 'Island Universe' at White Cube in 2008 consisted of five sculptural elements that occupied the entire ground floor of the gallery.

Each of these five elements in Island Universe is a kind of explosion of highly reflective chrome-plated aluminium, with a central sphere from which radiate rods of varying lengths; each rod ends with either a unique cluster of objects, which include smaller rods topped by hand-formed glass discs and globes, or a single light.

This spectacular sculpture, almost 5 metres across, is at once a play on the Lobmeyr-designed chandeliers in New York’s Metropolitan Opera and a vivid diagram of the Big Bang. The design of these chandeliers and the discovery of the first data supporting the Big Bang both occurred in 1965, and McElheny sees the confluence of these two events as representative of a time when our understanding of modernity started to fall apart, to be replaced by a new set of narratives.

The exhibition also includes a film upstairs, and I assisted Paul Schütze in his commission to create a soundtrack for it. Filmed on location in Super 16mm at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the film's five sections depict the types of universes in the installation, and each section is titled based on the theoretical structure of each element, such as Small Scale Violence, Frozen Structure, and Late Emergence. The music and the editing convey a rhythm that shifts, freezes and develops in relation to the scientific speculations about other worlds.

The exhibition ran from the 14th October to the 15th November 2008. White Cube was located at : 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

Open : 10am-6pm Tuesdays-Saturdays. Closed Sundays and Mondays.