The Brooklyn Rail

Neon glows from the wood-trim parlor of the Newport Art Museum, shining from a large pitch tent studded with antennae and LED strips, distorted and enlarged by the narrow walls that surround it. Two visitors, strangers to one another and perhaps themselves, slip off their shoes before pulling back the tent’s beige curtains to reveal a cushy rainbow field of luminescent pom-pom polka dots, the unmistakable backdrop of Bobby Anspach’s Place For Continuous Eye Contact (Tent) (2025, edition 1 of 3).

Participants take a seat in the tent, facing one another, each equipped with complimentary eye patches, heavy blankets embellished with pom-poms, and pom-pom-encrusted hooded hair dryers. The guests’ eyes meet, and their guide explains that they must keep eye contact for the next three and a half minutes. The neon lights deepen to vermillion, the walls of the tent begin to shift in color, value, and texture, and flesh becomes indistinguishable from pom-pom. The visitors fight against their instinct to break sustained eye contact—each comes to perceive the other differently, unsure whether to react to this oddly sudden intimacy with fear, sorrow, confusion, or reassurance.

It is easy to be preoccupied by the peculiarity of Anspach’s sculptures, and, since our encounters with them approach the psychedelic, the artist’s ideologically-driven works can be overpowered, and even commodified, through the SEO-friendly catch-all of the “immersive experience.” I too gravitated towards this framework in my prior coverage of Anspach’s memorial exhibition for Tussle, in which I drew parallels between Anspach’s individual-use sculptures, involving eye contact via an eye-shaped mirror, and the growing prevalence of VR technology in museums.

But Anspach’s two-person sculptures, which challenge viewers to extend compassion through a shared artistic encounter with a complete stranger, are perhaps more emblematic of his artistic mission than his individual-use sculptures. Anspach’s first solo museum exhibition, Everything is Change, which was curated by his MFA thesis advisor Taylor Baldwin, presents Anspach’s steadfast artistic development while prioritizing the artist’s methodologies over the broader spectacle of his sculptures.

Anspach (1987–2022) understood his practice to address what he considered key to saving the world from its inevitable, impending destruction. Anspach maintained that works like Place For Continuous Eye Contact could elicit a seismic perspectival shift in how we understand our invisible interconnection with each other and the world at large. In turn, he believed this universal ability to find common ground in a malleable landscape could unite us in the ongoing fight against both resurgent fascism and ongoing climate change.

Drawing from Zen Buddhism (particularly the concept of anatta, or the understanding that the individual is a pliable product of their environment and not a disconnected, static entity), Anspach’s works attribute human suffering to our misguided attachments to beings and relationships that are constantly evolving within life’s ebb and flow. When we encounter dynamics that we have spent our lives desperately searching for, argues Anspach, we expect them to remain the same thereafter and then react to change with disappointment, as the hallmark of growing apart rather than growing together.

Anspach characterized his ”Place For Continuous Eye Contact” installations as revelatory conduits that, as he put it in his MFA thesis, relieve visitors of “suffering that they did not even know they had” by making them aware of their dynamic cosmic connections to the world around them. By placing audiences in a disarmingly intimate space that upends their sense of spatial awareness and the social conventions around eye contact with strangers, Anspach reveals the potential we all share to activate and explore infinite states of consciousness. In turn, the works reveal the role anyone can play in anyone else’s life, from family to strangers, using empathy as a key material or medium, not unlike the pom-poms so characteristic of Anspach’s sculptures.

Newport Art Museum’s Everything is Change explores the full range of Anspach’s portfolio, incorporating Anspach’s earlier smaller sculptures, paintings, conceptual drawings, and stop-motion animation in addition to his larger installations. Anspach’s paintings, particularly his shimmery diptych Glitter Painting 1 and 2 (2015), foreshadow his ongoing fascination with each viewer’s singular perception of shifting lights. His tabletop sculptures, carnivalesque hybrids of musical instruments, bicycle horns, and hookah pipes, mark early attempts at creating head-trippy optical illusions with pom-poms. All of these are clearly proofs of concept, stepping stones towards Anspach’s place for continuous eye contact sculptures, which Baldwin describes as the magnum opus Anspach strove for, one iteration at a time.

Everything is Change expands the reflexivity of Anspach’s work by including a “chillout space,” an idea of Anspach’s which had not been implemented in prior installations. Intended to invite further contemplation after audiences experience the individual and two-person place for continuous eye contact sculptures, the concept originated from the chillout rooms of raves, similarly designed to provide a calming environment for intoxicated or exhausted concertgoers. In this exhibition the chillout space, designed by Lauren Rottet, is calming enough to allow the attendee some relaxation while visually interesting enough to inspire continued reflection on their relation to their environment. Here we see one of Anspach’s wall-mounted pom-pom gradient sculptures placed near a vat of crochet projects to which visitors can contribute. Rottet also mirrors the shape of the pom-poms with a nearby container of pennies and nearby spherical topiary, a thoughtful interplay of introspection and image association.

The Newport Art Museum’s sprawling wooden “Stick style” architecture cultivates a perfect anachronism when juxtaposed with Anspach’s work, a confluence of scintillating, mass-produced twenty-first century aesthetics and earthen, individuated nineteenth-century design.The museum’s location in the sleepy artistic town of Newport, Rhode Island is incongruously appropriate too, less than fifty miles from where Anspach earned his MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Like Anspach’s 2023 memorial exhibition at his former Gowanus studio, Everything is Change augments the impact of his artworks with such traces of his presence, as well as the melancholy of his absence.