The Last Scattering Surface is an apt, visual metaphor for modernity’s duality, for its promise of liberation and prosperity and for its sinister shadows--the Holocaust, the atom bomb and the violent excesses of the Cold War. Suspended from a long rod that leaves only a foot above the gallery’s wood floors, The Last Scattering Surface on view at the Henry Art Gallery through August 17th, looks like a fiery starburst captured at the moment before it completes its final descent and disintegration. Like an enormous chandelier, the sculpture has a shiny chrome core that is covered with small bulbs. Shooting out from the core are dozens of two to five feet long steel rods capped with hand-blown glass discs and small bulbs. On the days that I visited the gallery part of what created such visual drama was the not the piece itself but the dance of weak shadows that it cast across the floor beneath it. The shadows’ soft, spidery lines and gentle interplay of light and dark added an additional playful, even wistful element to the potential harshness of the piece’s immense size and seemingly endless shiny, reflective surfaces. On a side note: the sculpture hangs in the basement in an open space to the side of the Henry’s main staircase. The chandelier is thus bathed in aflood of natural and overhead lighting, a setting that creates too much competition for the chandelier’s low wattage bulbs. A separate, dimly lit room would have provided a better, more dramatic showcase for the sculpture.

Like much of McElheny’s previous work, such as An Historical Anecdote About Fashion from 1999 and his Architectural Model for a Totally Reflective Landscape (Park) from 2006, The Last Scattering Surface reveals the artist’s preoccupation with history, modernity and postwar industrial design. According to McElheny The Last Scattering Surface is meant to capture a specific historical moment, the year 1965, when the New York Metropolitan Opera’s current chandelier’s made their debut and when evidence to support thetheory of the Big Bang first emerged. The Metropolitan’s chandeliers are the handiwork of the Czechoslovak born Hans Harald Rath who at the time worked for the famous Austrian crystal maker, J & L Lobmeyer. Rath’s chandeliers--with their shooting, crystal-covered rods of varying lengths, look like twinkling ice crystal formations--embodied the optimistic zeitgeist of the early to mid-1960s, the years of the postwar economic boom and the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race. While the communists and capitalists’ road maps to modernity differed, both sides shared the dream of a modernized world, perfected through science and technology. These mid-century affinities trickled down to the domestic everyday through space-age design aesthetics and in the proliferation of synthetic materials, especially plastic and the petroleum-based polyester.

At first glance McElheny’s obvious reference to postwar modernist design, in all its gloriously naïve optimism, strikes a nostalgic chord. Yet upon closer inspection the darker, more critical aspects of McElheny’s work emerge. The Last Scattering Surface is not merely a nod to modernist design as embodied in Rath’s chandeliers. It is also a reference to that other fateful moment in 1965 when scientists published a paper that established the theory of the Big Bang as an expansion of the universe from its original state as a hot, dense core. In this sense, The Last Scattering Surface serves as a metaphor, capturing one of the first major fissures in modernity. It represents the splintering of modernity’s grand narratives. By the early 1970s, in light of the failures of 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the rise of identity politics and a sophisticated, individuating consumer culture the unifying potential of modernity’s dream waned and an era of social and political fragmentation began.

At the Henry you can also see McElheny’s 2006 16 mm film, Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965. The film was perhaps more effective than the sculpture at conveying the spirit of The Last Scattering Surface. Most of its five-minutes focus on the chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House. In McElheny’s deft hands they move beyond their static positions to become descending alien spacecraft and swirling galaxies. The viewer then catches brief glimpses of black and white grids of arrows and squiggles--lifted from the notebooks of some mid-century scientist’s notebook?--that might chart the path of atoms or planets, or even the upward struggle of sperm en route to anegg. It is the haunting musical score, written expressly for the film by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldrand, however, that truly gives the film its wings.Their score fills the gallery with ethereal clangs and celestial moans, inspiring a sensation of harrowing, at moments nearly frightening, darkness. But like the chandelier, which despite its potentially overpowering size andproximity to earth has a touch of whimsy and softness, the film and its musical score include touches of relief and lightness, such as occasional soft ticking sounds, which chime in like echoes from distant cymbals. And yet these moments of levity do not last long. For toward the last seconds of the film, the music builds once again and the chandeliers began a slow heavenward ascent, leaving the viewer to marvel at their illuminated underbellies. The camera then moves in to focus on the bright, reflective core of one of the chandeliers, moving incloser and closer to the lamp’s center. In the film’s final shot, the fading light disintegrates into millions of scattered pixels.

The Last Scattering Surface inspires an at times harrowing reflection, indeed a literal self-reflection, on the social and political fragmentation ushered in by the end of modernity’s dream. Months after my first visit I am still thinking about McElheny’s evocative film and his chrome and glass, chandelier, modernity’s falling star. It is difficult to shake the memory of observing my reflection scattered into its dozens of shiny spheres. It did not matter where I stood, nor from what angle I examined the sculpture, my reflection followed me. If it wasn’t staring out from the center of the piece’s large spherical core, it peered out from the end of one of the numerous metal rods. It brings to mind a line of verse from the Romanian poet, Ana Blandiana, whose father languished in a communist prison while Rath was completing work on the Met’s chandeliers. “The universe,” she writes, “haunts me with thousands of my faces/ And my only defense is to strike myself.”