Mary Corse, Untitled (White Inner Band), 2003

Narrator: In this final gallery, we see three examples of the formats that Corse began to explore between the 1980s and the present. In all of them, she deepened her investigations of light and perception.

Kim Conaty: Corse's White Light Inner Band paintings are among the most elusive of her White Light Series. These paintings, which include fields of matte white acrylic paint and two different types of fields of white acrylic paint with glass microspheres, change dramatically as the viewer moves from one side to the next.

Corse found that by painting with the glass microspheres in a specific way, she was able to create the appearance of an interior band that would appear and completely disappear as the viewer passed from one side of the canvas to the next. The way that Corse creates this effect is one of her most closely held secrets.

In the way that these works resist a static form, they also emulate light itself. Light is ambient. Light is ephemeral. Light continues to move. The experience of these works puts us in the driver seat. We are literally able to create our own experience, and to see them in a particular way, that she would acknowledge is distinct from how any other individual might see them.

These works also remind us that light itself is what makes vision possible. That it is only through light bouncing off of the physical objects around us that we are able to apprehend them as objects at all. And light becomes a protagonist in these works.