The exhibition includes Nancy Holt’s “Sunlight in Sun Tunnels” (1976). (photo courtesy of the MAK Center)

What does it mean to notice how we see? “Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics” at the MAK Center at the Schindler House through May 24 brings Holt’s study of perception into a close conversation with the site. Light, sound, language and movement meet as parallel systems for organizing perception. Across five decades, Holt (1938-2014) developed a body of work concerned with how we locate ourselves physically and perceptually within space. Holt consistently returned to questions of orientation – how attention is guided, how environments are read and how perception is shaped by context. R.M. Schindler’s “Kings Road House” (1921-22), with its pinwheel plan, constructed of slab-tilt concrete and conceived to integrate interior and exterior space, is a setting that resonates with the concerns. Installed throughout the house, Holt’s works sharpen awareness of how perception is framed and directed. Moving through the non-hierarchical spaces with the works in place draws attention to thresholds, sightlines and changing light conditions. What comes into focus is not only what is seen, but how vision is led by architecture, how the body is positioned within space and how perception shifts through movement.

Light is a defining material of the Schindler House, entering from multiple directions and altering throughout the day. The Pauline Schindler Studio is dedicated to Holt’s “Light and Shadow Photo Drawings” (1977), a group of 22 works that register light and shadow as material presences rather than ephemeral effects. In the R. M. Schindler Studio, two early photographic works – “Concrete Visions” (1967) and “Concrete Poem” (1968) – reflect Holt’s sustained engagement with concrete as both a material and a metaphor, linking her practice to the architectural language of the house itself. Holt’s voice returns in the 1969 video “East Coast/West Coast,” made with the artist Robert Smithson. Recalling television talk shows and improvisational theater, Holt and Smithson perform stereotypical positions of East Coast and West Coast artists of the late 1960s – Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays a laid-back Californian, driven by feelings and intuition. Both try to hide their smiles as they play to the clichés of their own time. Together, they invite visitors to slow down, listen and notice how perception unfolds through space.

For information, visit makcenter.org.

The Schindler House is located at 835 N. Kings Road.