"I could never have done the piece if it had been a Mozart opera," David Altmejd says of his original sculpture "The Eye." The young Canadian artist is having a solo exhibition in Gallery Met tied to the premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic. And anyone who saw his mammoth, bird-festooned installation at last year's Venice Biennale would agree that Altmejd's gifts are better suited to Adams's powerful exploration of the atomic bomb than to Mozart's elegant 18th century masterworks.

"My work has a kind of dramatic, over-the-top quality that corresponds to my idea of what opera is," Altmejd continues. "And the subject of Doctor Atomic–that really influenced my work... I tried hard not to make an illustration of the opera, but let myself be influenced by the graveness of the subject."

Altmejd's original idea was to create a giant explosion of mirrors, with human figures integrated into the installation. Giant human bodies and taxidermy often play a role in his work, and the original conception for the Atomic sculpture was no exception. In the end, though, Altmejd decided that the figures detracted from the severity he was trying to capture, so he focused on a symmetrical, architectural piece in which mirror is the central medium.

"Mirror can be beautiful, and it has a lot of symbolic potential," the artist states. "If you walk around a complicated mirror structure, you see your reflection but in a fragmented way. The mirrored structure acts a vortex. It sucks in the world around it and fragments it."

Altmejd was still working on the sculpture when he spoke to Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian about the piece. "David is someone whose thinking can veer on the dark side," Kazanjian says. "He can look at how the creation of the bomb affects our time, what it means today and in the future."

For his part, Altmejd hopes his vision corresponds with that of John Adams; although he listened to the music while working on the sculpture, he did not see the original production or sit in on rehearsals at the Met. "I'm worried about how my piece is going to read after I see the production," he says. "But I can't wait."
–Matt Dobkin