From our friends at Glasstire, today we bring you an excerpt from Terry Mahaffey’s review of the inaugural installation at the Byzantine Chapel in Houston. Mahaffey explores his memories of the site—it originally housed a series of frescoes, now gone—and wonders if Janet Cardiff and George Miller’s installation would be better presented in a more neutral space. This article was originally published on April 20, 2015.

Janet Cardiff and George Miller. The Infinity Machine, 2015 (detail); mixed-media installation in the byzantine Chapel of the Menil Collection, Houston.

Dominique de Menil’s son, François, designed and built the Byzantine Chapel for the express purpose of housing a group of 13th-century frescoes that had been looted from a small church near the Cypriot village of Lysi. After having been rescued and restored by Mme. de Menil, the frescoes were installed in the exquisitely designed chapel in 1997, where they were on continuous display until being returned to Cyprus in early 2012. The space was then left vacant and unused, but after due deliberation, the Menil Collection decided to reuse the space for a series of yearlong site-specific installations.

The inaugural installation, The Infinity Machine, by renowned Canadian audiovisual artists Janet Cardiff and George Miller, opened on January 31. It is an immersive installation comprised of a monumentally scaled mobile, with associated lighting and a sound collage that fills the main interior space of the Chapel building. The word “mobile” conjures images of Calder’s graceful, colorful constructions floating passively in space, but The Infinity Machine is not of that ilk: It activates the otherwise inert interior space with motion, sound and light. More than 150 antique mirrors and other objects rotate at a constant speed in the center of the space. Hung at varying heights and oriented in varying directions, they are illuminated from three sides, reflecting light in all directions, while otherworldly sound fills the space.

Read the full article here.