As as if a giant pink polyhedron had been cast into the corner of Disjecta, Jenene Nagy’s "Tidal" is a massive installation of hot pink irregular polygons and jagged shards cast across the floor, splashed onto two walls, and shattering on the rafters and trusses of the soaring space.

The installation is lit only by a horizontal strip of florescent tubes a few feet off the floor that run the perimeter of the l-shaped space. If my first impression was that the panels pushing and pulling with the wooden rafters in the shadows were lost without further illumination, my second was that the lighting strategy both further complicated the relationship of installation to architecture overhead and toyed with my perceptions of a single hue, in particular by brushing exquisite gradients on the vertical panels.

Nagy’s installations, like stage sets built of drywall and exposed 2×4s, reference the natural world with forms that evoke wave here, or flock as in "s/plit" at PAM, or with titles like "Meadow." But the blue-collar 2×4 supports of "Tidal" point away from the thing itself to that for which it is a stand-in, reinvigorating the reductive with possibility.

This review was first published in a longer form on ultra.