Shotz is internationally recognized for her room-sized sculptures and installations that often use industrial materials to produce delicate effects that exploit the play of light in the environment and with the viewer. They have, what Derek Eller called, "a luminous gravity.... a seamless, elegant manipulation of light and shadow as weightless and abstract as breathing." Shotz also occasionally uses photography to capture these same effects. This project, however, marks her first foray into the world of historic photographic techniques.

Shotz says of this series:

I've always been intrigued by the photographic process - each grain of silver making up an image that we recognize as a representation of reality. It’s a two-dimensional image made up of very tiny three-dimensional grains. I was interested in experimenting with the salt process because salt is also crystalline in structure. Salt is such an iconic element and is essential for life itself. When thinking about the salt process, I wondered about making salt the subject of the imagery by using it as the medium. The many grains are like stars in the sky and the crystalline structure reflects and refracts light. In these photographs, the grains of salt become galaxies in the universe. Working in the dark room, it seems possible to visit the far reaches of the universe through the humble means of salt scattered on paper.

Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in exhibitions such as Art & Space at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC and Pattern: Follow the Rules at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012, she received a Pollock-Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, among others.