Explore the most extensive presentation yet of groundbreaking artist Nancy Holt’s investigations into the systems that power our world.
Electricity brings us light and heat, oil powers buildings, and our waste decomposes in landfills. Yet we rarely, if ever, attend to the processes of these systems. Showcased in Nancy Holt: Power Systems, Holt’s System Works give these hidden structures sculptural presence. You’ll encounter Pipeline, which runs from outside the Wex into its lower lobby, and the immersive, room-size installations Electrical System and Heating System, which you can interact with.
The exhibition also features Holt’s innovative work across media, including sculpture, works on paper, film, and photography. Photography was an essential medium for Holt. The photographic series Time Outs and Texas Claims show how the process of viewing a particular place or activity through the camera enabled Holt to share her singular way of seeing with others. As a new media artist, Holt created experimental film and video works, including Revolve and Sun Tunnels, that explore the possibilities of narrative and technological aspects of the moving image. Experience an experimental approach to an interview in Revolve and the making of the large-scale earthwork Sun Tunnels, located in Utah’s Great Basin Desert.
Drawing was integral to Holt’s practice. You can study detailed drawings created for her System Works, including those installed in the Wex galleries. Other plans show incomplete projects, like Sky Mound, Holt’s most ambitious, which proposed transforming a massive landfill into a sanctuary for people and wildlife.
You’ll also encounter several written and audio works that probe how language, itself a system, can transform our perceptions of what we see. Others, like her concrete poem Making Waves, test the structure, content, and form of language.
In all the works in the exhibition, Holt draws our attention to the hidden structures that we rely on every day. In making them visible, she allows us to see not only what is there, but what is possible and what they make impossible.
Nancy Holt: Power Systems
Feb 7 – Jun 29, 2025
Wexner Center for the Arts
Columbus, OH, USA
