Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles interweaves sociopolitical commentary with the physical and visual structures of the built world. His immersive installations, often constructed with dense layers of everyday materials, provide sensory and cerebral experiences. Meireles’s work employs spatial and cognitive disorientation, often speaking to the conditions of dictatorship in Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s. Através (Through), 1983–1989, demonstrates this disorientation as a labyrinth composed of found industrial materials, including railings, fences, fishnets, barbed wire, and prison bars. The materials choreograph a path of travel for the visitor, operating as barriers while remaining penetrable by light and the viewer’s gaze. The winding path raises questions including: Is this construction meant to conceal or reveal? Is this structure one of protection or detention?

–From the Glenstone Field Guide