When Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino unleashes his massive installation “In the Light of a Shadow” in Building 5 at MASS MoCA to the public on April 3, its intent — charting the connections between a historical tapestry of Bloody Sundays with a focus on two in particular, Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972 — will register as immediate. Kaino’s own journey getting there, however, might hide in the shadows.

That’s something that makes this show unique: Kaino’s main materials for the piece are actually shadows, which is unusual even by MASS MoCa standards. But the way shadows ended up in that role is the result of circumstances that the artist couldn’t have foreseen five years ago when curator Denise Markonish approached Kaino to create a show for the museum.

“I said to him, ’I want you to do something for Building 5 but I don't have the space available for four or five years, and he said, ‘That's good, I have a project that's going to take about four or five years to make,’” Markonish told me.

“I don't like to rush and I don't like to just start making artwork, so to speak, without being informed,” Kaino explained. “Not only from an academic or research perspective, but actually from a personal relationship perspective.”

Kaino, a multi-media artist with activism at the core of his work, embraced the concept of "kit-bashing" into his art practice early on. "Kit-bashing" is the practice of mixing up manufactured model pieces into an entirely new piece. It's something used by special effects model makers in film. Kaino employs it conceptually, as well as materially, as with past work using Zapatista dolls, levitating hammers, candles as chess pieces, and combinations of sand and air for his sculptures.

With the MASS MoCA installation, Kaino knew it would take time to bring together the various parts in this kit-bashing effort and a lot of it had to do with people. There was a need to reconnect with all those he knew who had inspired the idea. He also wanted to talk to the late Congressman John Lewis and take a trip to Ireland to speak with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. He got to do all these things.

“There's just a lot of research and thinking, conversations and relationships to build and to be had that I knew would inform the work that would eventually be produced,” Kaino told me. “Little did I know that we would have a pandemic and our entire four-year plan would have to be scrapped and we would have to build an entirely new show in a year.”

Early plans make a pandemic pivot

Kaino’s pre-pandemic plans envisioned a show filled with “monumental” sculptures that required more shared production work between Kaino’s team and the fabricators at MASS MoCA. As of January 2020, at a meeting at the museum, that plan was still in place, and Kaino flew home with the expectation he and his team would work through the summer at the museum with the MASS MoCA fabrication crew. But then the pandemic hit and both Kaino and Markonish quickly understood that a change of plans was required.

“Thankfully, because of the long incubation period and the abundance of ideas that were collected and sorted through, there was a pathway for us to make a new show and I quickly assembled a new show,” Kaino said. “Well, not a new show. It's a new execution of the same ideas in a different format.”

Kaino got to work in March 2020, with the understanding that it would certainly be difficult — and given the pandemic, unpredictable — to ship huge pieces to the museum. The huge sculptures needed to be replaced with a more minimalist approach that, at the same time, packed even perhaps a more magnificent punch.

“In some ways the pandemic was a slight blessing,” Markonish said, “because I think it gave the show time to really form into what it is now, this very spectacular, immersive, almost theatrical experience inside Building 5.”

That’s where the shadows came in. The shadows were the pivot they sought, inspired by Kaino’s love of cinema and also his work with magicians.

“He knows all of these people who know about all of these shadow illusions and that was really interesting for him,” Markonish explained.

For instance, there’s Kaino’s work for magician Derek DelGaudio. Kaino produced and designed sets for DelGaudio’s off-Broadway show “In And Of Itself,” which was directed by Frank Oz. They also formed an experimental performance group named A.Bandit to bring art and magic together. This became all part of the mix as Kaino reconfigured his installation.

“We did a lot of research in science and physics and illusion,” Kaino told me. “And there are both conceptual and formal aspects that made the shadow exploration very viable. This is not a technical shadow trickery. This is a more theatrical political exploration. Part of the exploration of shadows is in fact a direct response to the kinetic moment in the pandemic, forcing us into a shift of our normative understanding of the way we interact in the world.”

Any artist who tackles Building 5 at the museum is well aware of the awesomeness of the space he or she is meant to fill. It’s always a challenge and often intimidating. The strange circumstances under which Kaino found himself creating a show for that space did an unexpected thing — it ended up shaping the show for the better as Kaino moved away from his original plans.

"A better show"

“It forced me to make something that scaled asymmetrically in order to responsibly use the space,” Kaino said. “I look back at the show that we were going to make and this is a better show. So I'm excited that the pandemic forced us to be even more constrained because as big as that space is, the discipline required to make a show in Building 5 is big.”

Now when visitors enter Building 5 they will be faced with a big black, charred wall, rather than the usual view staring through to the far end of the gallery. In that space will be something resembling a bonfire and charred sticks that elevate protest posters.

On the other side of the wall the entire gallery will be engulfed in darkness and visitors will move down a boardwalk through the installation, which Markonish describes as composed like a gallery and featuring recreations of scenes, like that of the Shadow V, the boat bombed by the IRA, now fashioned by light and objects casting shadows along the sides of the boardwalk.

The path will lead to sculptural works in the lower and upper mezzanines and feature audio accompaniment by Dave Sitek from the band TV on the Radio.

For Kaino, it’s not the end he expected five years ago in his studio when Markonish came for a visit, but it is one of those glorious moments in an artist’s life when the unexpected results of the journey yield more than what the artist started with. Kaino gives credit to the space itself for providing a framework that helped him get there.

“What it came down to was it's like an exercise in artistic discipline. It's the challenge of a lifetime. It's a humongous opportunity. It's terrifying. I'm very proud of the show. I feel that we actually made it a better show than it was.”

Glenn Kaino: "In the Light of a Shadow"
MASS MoCA Buiding 5 Gallery
On view beginning April 3, 2021

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