Earlier this fall, I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly’s Chelsea location, where he was completing his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. Celebrating works from 1973, 2020, and 2026, it’s the first time I’m seeing his solid light installations in person without the material separation of my computer screen. Myself and McCall find ourselves standing on the threshold of a pitch dark room. From the outside, one can’t hear much except for an obtrusive humming that drones in and out of the periphery. It is an arresting scene, at once existential and scientific.

In McCall’s decades long practice, he has shown his works at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2026), the Guggenheim in Bilbao (2024), the Tate Modern in London (2024), and Pioneer Works in New York (2018), to list a few. At the entrance, the schematic for his breakthrough work Line Describing A Cone (1973) is on display. I ask if that’s the drawing that he did while crossing the Atlantic. (Famously, McCall conceived of the artwork while on a ship between England and America), “No, that's a bit of an old wives' tale.” McCall says, “But it's true that by the time I arrived in this country on that boat trip, I had gotten the idea of a beam as volume.”

Most examinations of McCall’s work began with his 7-minute piece, Landscape for Fire (1972), a short film that sees performers dressed in white, lighting pots of gasoline aflame in a tightly choreographed manner, in a grid across a flat plane at dusk.  “My early work as an artist began with performance events conceived for a camera,” he says of the work. “Landscape for Fire (1972), [was initially] an outdoor live performance and it was filmed, leading to my also taking on the editing of the footage and a growing interest in certain artist filmmakers …I became increasingly struck by the idea of rendering down a film to its most basic components.” This fascination led McCall to the idea for Line Describing a Cone, his first “solid light” film for which he would later become well known. The idea of the piece, he says. “was to reverse the convention of viewing a film by facing a flat screen, turning instead toward a projector and a volumetric form in space.”

Then, McCall took a 20-year intermission to work as a graphic designer, “I made a living.” McCall says. He ran a graphic design studio and some art catalogs, but saw a career resurgence  with the Whitney Museum’s 2001 exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. There, Line Describing a Cone was displayed alongside pieces like Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966) or Paul Sharits' Shutter Interface (1975), as well as Andy Warhol’s Lupe (1966). Line Describing a Cone fit a material puzzle piece in the understanding of 1970s filmmaking. A kind of self-reflection of the changing nature of the medium at the time, this iteration was revitalized in a modern format, sans the tobacco smoke and cobwebs that helped to haze the original.

We begin our walkthrough by looking at the aforementioned seminal piece from an orthographic perspective. Much like looking at a stitched sweater from the inside, the circle projected onto the screen does little to give away the three dimensional projection on the other side. The form projected onto the screen is simple—a handless clock of sorts, looping once every 30 minutes, tracing the outline of a circle. On the opposite side of the screen, the resulting circle becomes a beam relayed from the eye of the projector. 

When one crosses the threshold of one of his solid light projections,the manufactured atmosphere of the space actually feels contained within the light. Unlike other more traditional films, you’re encouraged to put your back to the projected image. The focus is shifted to the object-ness of the light. There are little flecks of light that interrupt the circle’s transit, leftover of the original analog print. 

While the original analogue iteration used ambient dust and cigarette smoke to haze the blue beam, the current iteration has undergone some upgrades for modern installation. McCall now uses digital projections, which allow him to experiment with vertical beams, as seen in Skylight (2020). Shown at the Centre Pompidou for Nuit Blanche earlier this June, McCall has been iterating on the same work for six years. This particular version of the piece finds the viewer drawn to a pedestal, atop of which beams a cone of light. The face of the projection is a composite form inside of a circle illuminating ridges and edges that are intercut with flashes of light, the sound of a rolling thunderstorm thrumming underneath.

In McCall’s practice, the way that we define art and cinematic processes has changed beyond its original definition. “It's that idea of a Venn diagram with overlapping properties: sculpture is one, cinema is another, and motion as well. They become pieces that are not really one thing or another, but something in between. That idea of the diagram—the three types of movement,” he says. If his pieces in 1973 were static, they’ve steadily become more cinematic in dimension since then. He works frequently with sound producer and composer David Grubbs to underscore the works with noise. Skylight had the goal of synthetically producing a storm through its sound design. Swarm (2026) projects the sound of drones.

Featuring two oscillating circles accompanied by the sound of drones, Swarm shows McCall’s depiction of violence in the 21st century, distilling the oft too normalized violence and pervading fears of the world, examining subjects like the war in Ukraine as well as the impending climate crisis. In this room, walking through decades of McCall’s thoughtful and precise experiments with light and sound, one can’t help but feel consumed by the invocation of the sublime. A rainstorm; a light beam; munitions. McCall posits, looking at his work:“A slowly moving thunderstorm can easily be construed—or misconstrued—as an explosive device, a bomb.”