The gallery is the parking lot of a Walmart in Newburgh, New York. The dismal facade of the superstore looms in the background, but the artist is grinning as he presents his sculpture to perplexed shoppers. The sculpture looks like an ersatz time machine from an old sci-fi movie. There’s a big canopy made of glowing pink lights, with a tangled mess of wires streaming out from the frame that holds everything up. Below the canopy is a cot with a rug draped on top, and it is from the vantage point of this cot—lying there and looking up into the lights—that one is meant to view the sculpture, which is called Place for Continuous Eye Contact (c. 2014–2015). The artist, Bobby Anspach, is eager to share his machine, and the transportive visions it offers, with an unsuspecting public.
Anspach was fanatically devoted to producing “the most beautiful sculpture in the world.” He described this ambition to his friends and collaborators, and he wrote it on the surface of a painting he made in his late twenties—wrote it in messy, gloopy letters, as if his childhood self were writing it, as if it were an ambition he had harbored since his earliest days. The beauty he strived for was of the transcendent, dissociative variety, the kind that one might experience during psychedelic trips or the strangest of dreams. Anspach passed away in 2022 at the age of thirty-four, leaving behind an exuberant oeuvre of multimedia works and sculptural installations. The fruits of his career are now on display in the exhibition “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” at the Newport Art Museum. The show—Anspach’s first solo museum presentation—is a homecoming of sorts for the Ohio-born artist, who graduated from Boston College in 2011 and earned an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Taylor Baldwin, who advised Anspach at RISD, guest-curated the exhibition. (The Newport Art Museum laid off its curatorial team last year—an unfortunate, widely criticized decision.) Spanning several rooms in the museum’s Victorian-era Griswold House, the show features candy-colored acrylic paintings, cartoonish drawings, and whimsical structures made of pom-poms, a signature building material for Anspach. Yet the zany appearance of these pieces belies the seriousness of Anspach’s belief that his art could have profound effects on those who encountered it.
The sculpture Anspach brought to a Walmart parking lot in 2022 was part of a project that obsessed him for much of his artistic career. He began developing the concept for Place for Continuous Eye Contact as a student and continued to build versions of the piece for the rest of his life. Two works from this series anchor the Newport show. Each installation allows you to gaze into an eye: either that of another person or, strangely, your own. Anspach believed that this interval of prolonged gazing, intensified by immersive lighting effects, could offer a visual experience of such beauty that one might undergo a psychological recalibration, instilling in the viewer a sense of interpersonal and ecological responsibility. “He had faith that it was possible that you could leave with a clear and unshakeable understanding that you were inherently connected to the universe around you,” writes Baldwin in his essay for the exhibition, commenting on the intended effects of his former student’s contraptions. Vexed both by the disastrous state of the environment and an increasingly fragmented public sphere, Anspach sought to create mind-altering works that would bring us closer to each other and our beleaguered planet.
Bobby Anspach, (left) When the Mind Lets Go and (right) The Beautiful Nothing, both c. 2014–2015. Both acrylic on canvas. Installation view, “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” the Newport Art Museum, 2025. Photo by Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Anspach Foundation and the Newport Art Museum.
“Everything is Change” branches out in several directions from the lobby of the Griswold House, letting viewers drift between conventional gallery spaces and rooms that still have the appearance of Gilded Age domestic interiors. In one of the former, the focus is on Anspach’s early-career paintings. Many of these works are more textual than graphic, covered in dripping, disorderly writing, successive letters varying in both size and color, like the way kids write. At the edge of one painting, I spotted the infamous “Cool S” that haunts the margins of tweens’ notebooks. The phrases written on the canvases offer philosophical musings and describe the artist’s aspirations, like making the aforementioned “most beautiful sculpture in the world.” The most distinctive pieces in this set, however, are two large-scale works on canvas that mostly do away with text. Glitter Painting 1 and Glitter Painting 2 (both 2015) together span an entire wall of the gallery. A dense layer of glitter covers the surface of each canvas, turning it into a shimmering, golden expanse, like a kitsch version of Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1980–1982). Closer inspection reveals the glitter to contain red and green flakes mingling with the gold, forming a kaleidoscopic pattern of circles, like the pom-poms in miniature. Félix González-Torres described Horn’s Gold Field as “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty.”1 Anspach’s glitter paintings, too, offer a sort of dream space with their sparkling multitudes, like an efflorescence of stars. While Horn’s sculpture is a sheet of literal gold foil, Anspach chose simple arts-and-crafts materials to compose his portals into other worlds and other states of consciousness. For him, the transcendent could be accessed through the ordinary, through objects of minimal value. The only text in the glitter paintings is the artist’s signature—“Bobby A.”—painted in the bottom right corner of each canvas in big, clownish letters. The signature is goofy and a little self-effacing, a playful touch that once again grounds Anspach’s evocation of the sublime in an aesthetic of youthful creativity.
Bobby Anspach, (left) Glitter Painting 1 and (right) Glitter Painting 2, both 2015. Both acrylic and glitter on canvas. Installation view, “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” the Newport Art Museum, 2025. Photo by Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Anspach Foundation and the Newport Art Museum.
Meanwhile, the eye contact installations dominate two of the museum’s ornate, wood-paneled rooms. Place for Continuous Eye Contact (Tent) (2025) looks like a child’s oversized fort, a pillowy enclosure with an upholstery-like exterior and strips of neon lights jutting out on top. When I visited the show I was with a friend, and together we approached the gallery attendant who was facilitating visitors’ sessions in the tent. The attendant asked us to take off our shoes and gave us each an eye patch, explaining that we would enter the structure, put on the eye patch, and stare into each other’s eye (the one not covered) for around three minutes. Lifting the front flap, we crawled into a plush cocoon of golf-ball-sized pom-poms, which coat the tent’s interior surfaces from top to bottom and hang in strands above like psychedelic stalactites. We sat down, facing each other, on cushioned chairs. The attendant draped a pom-pom blanket over our legs and torsos and obscured our necks and upper extremities with pom-pom masks, so that there was nothing in my field of vision except pom-poms and my friend’s bemused expression. We put on headphones, the attendant left, and our three minutes of eye contact began.
The occlusion of an eye flattens one’s perception, and so as I looked into my friend’s face everything before me swirled and softened. The lights pulsed and the colors shifted and the awkwardness of prolonged staring began to shed away, allowing me to bask in the familiarity and mystery of this cherished face. My intrigue was dampened, however, by the music playing on the headphones, a composition produced by the musician Matthew Robert Cooper (also known as Eluvium), who collaborated with Anspach on the sonic component of the eye contact machines. This particular soundscape was a trite ambient wash, an overly sappy addition to a visual experience that already had its own emotional heft.
Bobby Anspach, Place for Continuous Eye Contact (Dome), 2025. Installation view, “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” the Newport Art Museum, 2025. Photo by Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Anspach Foundation and the Newport Art Museum.
Place for Continuous Eye Contact (Dome) (2025), across the hall, resembles the structure Anspach presented at Walmart and is meant for a solo participant. Gazing up into a dome of pom-poms, one sees a tiny mirror just big enough to fit a reflection of a single eye. It’s a clever setup, yet without the drama of another person, there’s not enough substance, enough live matter, to be alchemized and unsettled by Anspach’s optical effects. The idea, it seems, is to allow for a moment of introspection, yet the time I spent making eye contact with myself felt more like an exercise in solipsism. Such an outcome is clearly at odds with Anspach’s credo, with the values he drew from his study of Buddhism and his experiences with psychoactive drugs. He wanted his art to dissolve the boundaries of the self and thus reveal that “you and others were just different parts of the same interconnected thing,” as Baldwin puts it. Anspach believed that there was power in this kind of mindset, that it could help us overcome our divisions and even equip us to confront environmental calamities. Yet the tender sincerity of Anspach’s efforts, as presented in this exhibition, did not manage to quell my doubts. I’m wary of anything that purports to erase the differences between people or unlock a new mode of access to other beings. The necessary task is to care for others in all their differences—to see a face, or an eye, and learn nothing from it, and to approach that void without fear.
1 Félix González-Torres, “1990: L.A, ‘The Gold Field’,” in Earths Grow Thick: Roni Horn, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 1996), p. 68.
“Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” is on view through September 28 at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island.
