Evolve 17 Sculpture to Enhance Space

About Evolve 17 Sculpture to Enhance Space

Evolve 17 is a suspended sculpture created for the executive atrium of a corporate headquarters. The work is a prismatic column that stands 7000 mm tall and 1200 mm wide and weighs 250 kilograms. Evolve 17 is built from 161 unique pieces, using dichroic plexiglass, stainless steel, aluminum and mirrors, together with LED light and sunlight. The dichroic panels show different colors from different viewpoints, so the colors shift as visitors walk around the column. A custom aluminum hinge lets each panel rotate and lock at a chosen angle.

Within the trajectory of contemporary light-based installation practice, Davis McCarty's Evolve 17 Sculpture to Enhance Space represents a sophisticated synthesis of geometric precision and phenomenological experience, positioning itself within traditions extending from the Light and Space movement through contemporary explorations of dichroic and interference materials. The work demonstrates exceptional command of optical physics, deploying dichroic surfaces that selectively transmit and reflect different wavelengths depending on viewing angle, thereby transforming a static sculptural object into a dynamic environmental intervention that fundamentally alters the character of its architectural setting. The double-pyramid configuration, meeting at a compressed waist, creates formal tension between expansion and contraction while establishing powerful vertical presence within the double-height atrium space. McCarty's technical achievement lies in the precise calibration of panel angles to maximize spectral dispersion, creating caustic projections that paint the surrounding architecture with ephemeral bands of pure spectral color—an effect that continuously shifts with changing daylight conditions and viewer movement. The work engages meaningfully with its corporate architectural context, introducing organic chromatic complexity into an otherwise restrained modernist palette of white, gray, and glass. The inclusion of human presence within the documentation—a figure traversing the mezzanine whose fuchsia attire creates chromatic resonance with the sculpture's warmer facets—emphasizes the experiential and participatory nature of the installation, suggesting that the work achieves full realization only through embodied encounter. Viewers might contemplate how this intersection of technological material innovation and timeless geometric form creates space for contemplation of light itself as a medium of aesthetic experience.