David Sherry on Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’

David Sherry on Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’: "

“It is a very desolate area, but it is totally accessible, and it can be easily visited, making Sun Tunnels more accessible really than art in museums . . . A work like Sun Tunnels is always accessible . . . Eventually, as many people will see Sun Tunnels as would see many works in a city-in a museum anyway.” – Nancy Holt, 1988.

In 2009, photographer David Benjamin Sherry visited the site of Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’, an X-shaped cluster of four concrete tunnels in the Utah desert. Each of the tunnels are dotted with holes in the formation of various star constellations, and are positioned to offer different views of the passage of the sun across the sky.

During his visit to the installation, David created the photographic series of collaged C-prints called ’Eye sore sun tunneling with throbbing penumbras’, published in A#9 with his recount of the voyage. The images are ethereal, stark representations of the arid landscape as seen through the mystical tunnels, featuring Hungarian artist Reka Reisinger as his nude subject.

Read his account here:

“Reka and I searched for hours and what seemed light years to find Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’. The desert diamonds of Utah mirrored in our imagination and all sense of direction was lost. We looked east and found west, we drove south but ended north, disoriented. Racing against the sun and with dust bowls encircling around our hovering vehicle, we mysteriously landed in from of Sun Tunnels in the Great Basin Desert on the eve of the Spring Equinox and ran wildly out of our vehicle. Light was beaming through the massive cement structures and us. There was not a soul in sight for hundreds of miles; we laughed hysterically and howled at the setting sun. Alone in the vast desert, extreme solitude and a new form of silence took over. All intentions were lost and we began to see Sun Tunnels as an experience rather than a piece of standing art. They took on a bigger meaning; an escape from society, a meditational retreat for the soul, lungs of the earth, silence, purity and a color cleanse. We observed the sun travel on a warm evening in the American West and were left dazzled, alone in the dark, with our imaginations recharged and running sublime.” – David Sherry.

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