In the middle of the sprawling and packed exhibition floor at the Armory Show, Brooklyn-based Yuko Nishikawa has given visitors a reason to take pause and reflect.

The artist, in collaboration with Danish Kering-owned eyewear brand Lindberg, has created a meditative environment of kinetic mobile sculptures for the New York art fair. The installation includes several hanging works fashioned from delicate metal wires and deconstructed components of Lindberg eyewear, as well as smaller well-mounted works. Although the collective delicate webbing of Nishikawa’s pieces is difficult to decipher from a distance, the artworks come into sharp focus as guests approach the open white-walled exhibition space.

The artist, who studied interior design at FIT, worked as a lighting and interior designer for Donghia before pivoting to a fine art practice. Her background is evident in her creative approach, which renders color and texture through recent immersive mobile installations.

The exhibition was inspired by Lindberg’s 2025 sunglasses collection, rooted in light, color, and minimalism.  The invitation to submit a project proposal for the brand’s second Armory Show collaboration arrived just as Nishikawa began wearing glasses, and was thinking about the functionality of eyewear. 

“Their engineering was really interesting to me,” says Nishikawa, who visited a Lindberg store earlier this spring to get a better sense of the material components involved in the brand’s eyewear. 

For her installation at the Armory Show, she picked and pulled those materials apart. 

“I wanted to use the language of the eyewear in the final artwork,” says Nishikawa of her approach, which incorporates all of the various elements — colored lenses popped out and layered, titanium and acetate frames that have been cut, bent, enlarged and twisted, clear eye pads that have been separated and suspended like crystals of a chandelier. “I wanted to manipulate [the materials] in a way that it’s not still eyewear,” she adds.

The exhibition is titled “Perception Play,” a nod to the art’s eyewear foundation: the installation is something that both sees, and is seen by, the viewer. “I think about the relationship between us and objects; it’s almost like we see art, but then the art also needs us to be seen,” says Nishikawa, who set out to create an environment that would invite people to wander around the space and explore different proximity with the pieces. “If you become closer to the artwork, the air moves, and then in reaction to that, the art also slowly moves.”

As kinetic sculptures, the mobiles are in constant subtle movement, catching the exhibition hall’s light and casting shadowy reflections around the exhibition space that shimmer and shift with the viewer, “like you are looking into a reflection on water,” says Nishikawa. “The movement of these pieces gives you a sense of quietness.”

“Perception Play” will be on view throughout the duration of the Armory Show, which concludes on Sunday.