From the exhibition catalogue: Anait, Retrospective 1966-1979
The exhibition of Anait’s holography and related works at the Museum of Holography marks a decade of experiment with new technologies and imageries. An accomplished sculptor in bronze and clay, Anait turned in the mid 1960’s from set to fluid media. Her first series of new works evolved in poured and cast resins. An interest in light, both as it passes through objects and as a pure medium, led to five remarkable environments: Mylar Room - ‘Nos Ipsi’, Color Spaces, Color’s Encomium, and two laser light environments. In the environmental pieces participation was a major element of the work, and this feature continues to be a primary factor in the series of holograms begun at the same time as the laser light environments. Despite a wide diversity of media, Anait’s work of this period (1968-1973) is a continuing, coherent attempt to create maximal imagery, an art as direct yet sophisticated in its application of new media as it is open yet suggestive in content.
Partially because of her love of paradox in art, Anait turned to holography, at that time (1970) a quasi or non-media, whose aesthetic potentials were still in the early stages of development. Anait experimented simultaneously with two very different types of holography: ‘holodeon’, her term for the revolving white light transmission holograms pioneered by Lloyd Cross of Multiplex, and reflection holograms which are viewed by ‘white’ light. The anecdotal imagery of the ‘holodeons’ relate them to Anait’s environmental pieces, while the plate holograms carry forward her experiments with light as the definitive element in sculpture. At first the vocabulary of this experiment was geometric and abstract, and only in the last two years has Anait introduced more complicated representational imagery, along with more complex relationships between virtual and real (projecting) images. Anait’s holography is remarkable for its technical advances, achievements created by the artist-as-scientist without technical help, and for the statement of an aesthetic in which optics, illusion and the encoding of a fourth dimension have equal presences.
Dr. David Schaff, Consultant
Art in the Academy Programs,
The National Academy of Sciences
1979