The Certainty of Glass and the Doubt of Vision

Atticus Art Gallery, Bath | 9 September - 31 October

In Refraction Index: 1.52, the solo exhibition by artist Suzanna Voit, who was born in Kazakhstan, at Atticus Gallery, Bath, the viewer is immersed in an experience that moves far beyond objecthood. Voit’s work operates at the intersection of sculptural materialism, perceptual psychology, and environmental engineering. Her forms—composed of meticulously cast and machined glass—serve not as static works of art but as instruments of perceptual disruption, activating a choreography of doubt that subtly destabilises the viewer’s confidence in the veracity of sight.

The title of the exhibition, a direct reference to the standard refractive index of optical glass (1.52), foregrounds Voit’s conceptual and technical approach. What she offers is not merely sculpture but a controlled optical environment in which glass is transfigured—transformed by light into the illusion of ice. Each sculpture is situated atop a monolithic plinth embedded with a precisely calibrated lighting system, custom-engineered in response to the specific spectral conditions of the exhibition space. Rather than lighting the work in the conventional sense, these systems intervene at the level of vision itself, producing subtle modulations in hue, shadow, and surface reflection that render the glass cold-seeming, damp, and physically convincing as melting ice. The viewer is not deceived by extravagance or gesture but by the restrained logic of spectral coherence. In effect, Voit has constructed a language of belief spoken fluently through light.

This methodology situates Voit within a lineage of artists who work not with form alone, but with perception as medium. Yet her practice resists the transcendental affect associated with Light and Space artists such as James Turrell or Robert Irwin. Where those figures seek to evoke awe or spiritual dissolution, Voit’s intent is epistemological. Her sculptures are propositional objects, interrogating the mechanisms by which sensory information is naturalised as truth. What is most disquieting about her work is not that it successfully simulates ice, but that this simulation remains impervious to knowledge. One may be intellectually certain that the sculpture is glass, and still experience it as ice. Voit’s practice thus exposes the precognitive nature of belief—how the body arrives at conviction before the mind can refute it.

The works themselves are stark and affectively potent. Voit avoids decorative gesture, favouring minimal, sharply delineated forms that recall geological artefacts, glacial ruptures, or biomorphic extrusions caught mid-melt. The surfaces of the sculptures appear to breathe or condense, not through material texture but through the precise orchestration of reflection and refraction. These forms, while visually contained, enact a slow, destabilising effect on the viewer. The experience is not unlike standing before a block of ice and realising it is neither wet nor cold, yet being unable to relinquish that sensation. What is achieved here is not mimicry, but ontological confusion.

Voit’s technical rigour is deeply informed by her academic background in sculpture, completed at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design between 2011 and 2016. Her Soviet-era training imbues her practice with an architectural restraint and clarity, while her contemporary concerns draw from fields as varied as optics, environmental design, and perceptual theory. Her capacity to collapse these disciplines into a coherent sculptural practice marks her not only as a visual artist but as a phenomenological engineer. She does not present objects to be looked at but environments to be perceived through—a subtle yet significant distinction that places her work within the expanding discourse of post-medium, site-responsive art.

In the current cultural and political climate, characterised by the erosion of shared visual truth and the proliferation of digital manipulations, Voit’s practice feels uncannily prescient. Her sculptures confront the viewer with the limits of empirical seeing, while implicating them in the very systems that produce these illusions. The viewer is not a passive recipient of deception but an active participant in it. The sculptures function as mirrors, not of the self, but of perception itself—how it is shaped, conditioned, and ultimately, how easily it can be led astray.

Refraction Index: 1.52 is not, then, an exhibition in the traditional sense, but a site-specific investigation into the politics of seeing. Voit constructs a world where nothing has changed but the conditions of visibility—and yet, everything is transformed. Glass becomes ice. Illusion becomes affect. Certainty becomes doubt. The sculptures resist our understanding not because they are opaque, but because they are too clear, too precise, too convincingly aligned with the parameters of belief. And in that fragile space between what is seen and what is known, Voit reveals the fundamental instability at the heart of perception.

It is this gesture, executed with chilling elegance, that positions Suzanna Voit as a significant voice in contemporary sculpture. Her work speaks not through spectacle, but through quiet precision, through the politics of surface and the ethics of sight. In Refraction Index: 1.52, she has not only crafted objects of deceptive beauty, but spaces in which the viewer’s own perceptual certainties are slowly, almost imperceptibly, unmade.

This exhibition was organised with the support of Eastside Projects and Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre.

Atticus Art Gallery (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath)

For more on CARC LAB’s research and future exhibitions, visit atticusartgallery.co.uk

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.