“Hollow Point 101” by Nancy Baker Cahill

Hollow Point 101 by Nancy Baker Cahill shatters more than just the glass ceiling at LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light

Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist we have always admired here at NOW Art. Not just because she’s a creative genius, but because by shattering the fundamentals of reality with every new creation, she is also shattering the glass ceiling.

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Cahill’s work lives in the intersection of fine art, new media and activism, and it has taken the male-dominated land art sector by storm. If you saw Hollow Point 101 exhibited at LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light, you’ll understand why.

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Hollow Point 101 was (quite aptly) created in response to what felt, to Cahill, like an expanding moment of high impact shattering – culturally, politically, and environmentally. For our one-night-only event, it existed on both the outside wall of the 420 W 11th St building of downtown Los Angeles, and in the hands of the audience.

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Those who attended LUMINEX were beckoned into Hollow Point 101’s portal-like world, and were also able to engage with the artwork themselves through their phones by using the 4th Wall App created by Cahill herself. 

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Cahill’s free app provides accessible, interactive augmented reality art experiences to anyone who uses it. By installing the 4th Wall App, the LUMINEX audience members were able to digitally project Hollow Point 101 into the space before them using the camera function on their phone.

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Audience members could watch people walk through it, make it move around the environment, and even take it with them as they walked to the next exhibition site. The effect was, in the words of award-winning art critic and LA Times editor, Shana Nys Dambrot, “hypnotizing.”

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This is what makes Cahill’s work so revolutionary, and why she was the perfect person to exhibit at LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light. With this exhibition, our mission was to bring art to the Los Angeles community at no cost to them, and allow them the space for collective healing after a year of being separated in a way that no-one has experienced before. Cahill’s entire career has been focused on bringing artwork to the community.

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What is even more special about Cahill’s work is that it has not just been created to be superficially accessible (like being able to Google an image of a piece of artwork you love), but to be intentionally accessible. Which is to say that her artwork is not being translated into a digital, easy-to-access medium, it is being made directly for this medium.

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If you weren’t at LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light, we made sure you can still access this artwork through the livestream we captured it on – Check it out here.

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More about the artist

Nancy Baker Cahill, born in Boston MA, is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She works at the intersection of fine art, new media and activism, and is the creator of the 4th Wall App.

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She actively engages in conversations about what it means to make art accessible and what the future of art has to offer, as can be seen in her 2018 TED talk, Augmented Reality (AR) as an Artist’s Tool for Equity and Access among other public appearances.