Jonathan Lyndon Chase in The House of the Trembling Eye 

In the House of the Trembling Eye is an expansive group exhibition staged by the London-based artist Allison Katz across the entirety of the Aspen Art Museum, organized in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Marking the Aspen Art Museum’s 45th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of its Shigeru Ban-designed building, the show brings to the fore unexpected affinities among over one hundred artworks and objects in varied styles from different epochs, celebrating the inexhaustible capacity of painting to generate new conversations across time.

Invited to bring to life an exhibition incorporating works from personal art collections in and around Aspen, Katz approaches curation and display as extensions of the act of painting itself. In the House of the Trembling Eye will present her works, both new and recent, alongside artworks by over fifty artists as well as a series of fragments of frescoes from Pompeii. With this project, Katz tackles the definitions of public and private experiences of art in a non-collecting institution. The fluidity and mixed use of spaces in ancient domestic environments, such as those found in Pompeii, seen by the artist as a precursor of the contemporary museum, become key organizational principles for the exhibition architecture.

The artworks are displayed within a specially designed environment that grafts the layout of an ancient Pompeian domus (home) onto the museum, shifting the atmosphere across all three floors of the building. Echoing ancient methods of choreographing the gaze through architectural design, using through-way views, raised floors, partitions, and curtains to intimately orchestrate visitors’ movements and interactions, Katz’s exhibition considers some of the fundamental questions of images: how they may inhabit shared surroundings and one’s own mind, and how they may influence past and future patterns of thinking.