The Brooklyn Rail

Art audiences have come to expect a Judy Pfaff exhibition to be a dazzling, immersive, thought-provoking experience, and Light Years, an exhibition of thirteen recent works, does not disappoint. An influential innovator and pioneer of installation art, Pfaff’s maximalist vision encompasses conglomerations of found everyday objects and detritus—often discarded plastic. She recycles and melds these items into baroque compositions of organic forms and hard-edge geometric shapes organized according to the precepts of a personalized topology. Each piece in Light Years is an assemblage wall relief construction with metal rod supports that sometimes project several feet into the gallery space. All produced in 2025, the works in the show all incorporate LED lights and/or neon, a light-emitting means of drawing in space that the London-born, upstate New York-based artist has mastered over the years. Pfaff credits UrbanGlass co-founder Joe Upham as a collaborator in the fabrication of the intricate neon elements that she has designed for each work in this exhibition. Pfaff immediately envelops viewers with a warm environment of colorful glowing neon that permeates the entire space. Light Years, however, consists of individual pieces that impart diverse themes and distinct moods.

Nearly filling one wall, a mural-size, multi-paneled piece, finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, conveys an almost epic narrative, albeit relayed in Pfaff’s abstract visual language. The work, made of ten equal size abutting panels, spans nearly 9-by-40-feet, with neon and acrylic elements embedded in rectangular panels of clear resin. Having studied at Yale with Al Held, Pfaff has a background in painting, as this panoramic composition attests. The work can be “read” from right to left—the far-right panel is packed with a rigorous pattern of colorful acrylic rectangles topped by squiggly white neon that activates the already hyperactive surface. The panels to the left become progressively reductive, with the neon elements increasingly less curvilinear and more austere, until at the center they are almost straight lines vertically traversing the panel. A shining denouement, the far left panel is nearly devoid of color except for a few splashes of black, deep blue, and turquoise pigment layered within the clear resin palimpsest.

More intimate in scale and tone, Azul Cielo has a rather romantic feel. Here, a tangled line of sky-blue neon segues to a curlicue stretch of white neon that ascends like a cirrus cloud upward in a diagonal composition more than five feet wide. As the neon tubes intertwine with several strands of colorful plastic leaves and flowers, and clusters of wires plus the neon power pack and transformer are exposed at center, this work appears as a sumptuous wedding bouquet—for the hypothetical marriage of nature and technology, no doubt.

Pfaff’s work is most often bright, visually stunning, and evocative, but a brooding undercurrent and a consistent note of gravitas may also be found in the mix. The accumulations of melted plastic and glass elements, broken ceramic vessels, and other objects often appear in the work as barnacle-covered concretions, like relics found in old shipwrecks, denoting a type of cultural and sociopolitical entropy. One such example of this abject beauty is blue is for sky, yellow is for wheat—one of the most riveting works in the show—which the artist created as an homage to Ukraine, its people, and current plight. Here, the blue and yellow tones of the country’s flag predominate. Against a foundation of vertical bands of blue and yellow resin pours, and a pattern of curvilinear neon elements in the same tones, branches of a barren tree protrude from the upper left, redolent of the devastation caused by the ongoing war. Next to the branches, a configuration of small gold, blue, and white disks rises above a large basket-like vessel containing LED lights, plastic flowers, and other vegetal shapes—evocative of Ukraine’s fertility and its reputation as the “breadbasket of Europe.”

One of the most fantastical works on view, Travels to Bisnegar, refers to a magic carpet from the Arabian Nights. In this arresting tableau, an eleven-foot-long expanse of a found, woven plastic rug, reinforced with epoxy, hovers horizontally nearly two feet from the wall like an aerial view of an undulating, flying carpet. Attached to the rug, eight vertical rods of red, yellow, blue, and green neon—each over five feet tall—illuminate the mat from the back and the front in a way that enhances the illusion of a carpet floating in space.