Surrounded by these treasures, I would “celebrate Mass,” staging a private liturgy of my own. From this early enchantment with ritual, the exhibition at Secession, Vienna (29 May – 31 August 2025) unfolds. In three new sculptural installations, Shaw merges religious iconography with speculative futurism. Drawing on the symbolic languages of devotion, psychedelia, and science fiction, the works explore how transcendence is constructed—and how it can still be felt.
The first work, Maximum Horizon (2024), is a monumental stained-glass triptych built into raw drywall partitions. Its glowing gradient fields, shifting from golden yellow to opaque black, evoke both church windows and science-fiction event horizons. The tapering lead lines pull the eye toward a vanishing point that remains forever out of reach. It is at once sacred and technological, a relic from a future spirituality.
The Distance Between Infinite Folds Is Still You (2025) turns inward. Three flame-worked glass vessels modeled on the paradoxical geometry of the Klein bottle shimmer with vaporized DMT residue. They resist orientation and comprehension, like devotional objects whose power lies precisely in their opacity. Here Shaw transforms mathematical and psychedelic references into a sculptural meditation on the limits of representation and the desire to touch another dimension.
The crescendo comes with Devotion Structure (Accumulated) (2025), a steel votive stand holding 247 red glass candleholders, each flickering with wax LED candles. The atmosphere is multisensory: paraffin scent, the sharp crack of glass, pulsing sound. Gradually, the scattered lights spiral into a vortex, a hypnotic choreography of devotion. The piece borrows the affective mechanics of the church while pushing them toward a cosmic spectacle. Across these works, Shaw practices what he has described as “assisted vérité”: an aesthetic that merges documentary textures, ritual codes, and speculative narratives.
The effect is not parody but reverence for the shared architectures of transcendence, whether religious or technological. Towards Logarithmic Delay demonstrates how ritual persists, even when divorced from doctrine. Shaw reveals how atmosphere, repetition, and sensory intensity can still induce awe—whether in the nave of a cathedral or the white cube of an exhibition space.
What lingers is less a fixed meaning than a charge: the recognition that we remain hungry for thresholds, for portals that promise a glimpse of something beyond ourselves. What will we find there? Still, perhaps luckily, unknown.
Amanda Luna Ballerini is a writer based in Italy. Her work moves across language, image, and identity, guided by intuition and a refined sense of form. She has written for Flash Art, Vogue, Exibart, Les Nouveaux Riches, Italy Segreta, and other leading publications.
