Merle Temkin Castle

Merle Temkin (b. 1937, Chicago, IL) created Castle as a walk-through installation with alternating narrow, horizontal strips of mirrored Plexiglas and corresponding spaces. The strips are loosely tethered to posts to allow them to waver and shimmer in the breeze. The structure is composed of both straight and curved strips, and therefore creates two different kinds of reflections.

Temkin, whose work always includes mirrored surfaces, is a site sculptor. Her particular concern is viewer participation. She likes to elicit the “confusion” that results from the fractured reflections through which the viewer becomes literally “mixed into” her pieces. This transubstantiation of imagery, she feels, causes the viewer to abandon and rise above whatever preconceptions he or she may have as to what a work of art ought to look like. She says, “I don’t want to make anything that looks like quote, Art, unquote.”