Spectrum III : Exhibition Context

Light makes things appear, it is bound to seeing and so to knowing. It has the power to make us aware; visionaries throughout the ages ‘see the light’ in moments of inspiration. This selfsame trust in light can also be deceptive; illumination playing tricks with the senses ‘they have eyes so they might not see.’ The artists in Spectrum play with and against the grain of light, diffusing it through contemporary discourses, aesthetic, cultural, historical and political, transforming it into light sculptures, installations and projections. The exhibition takes light as both medium and effect, allowing for a complex interaction between exhibition space, object and spectator.

Reflection, diffraction, illumination, communication, this is the range of Spectrum. Raphael Daden’s Light and Interaction plays with the thrill of illumination. Each viewer is able to compose a different light pattern via an interactive switchboard. Light is both observed and produced, in a clever reworking of the cultural association of light with creativity. Michael Takeo Magruder’s [ daemon ] reflects the ‘dualistic nature of information as both detritus and commodity’ in today’s globalised society. The dynamic between information as composition and communication is mediated by light, in the transformation of data from a digital to an analogue form. Bill Jackson’s elements explores some of light’s interstitial qualities, the intangible spaces between states or dimensions. Somewhere adjacent to the virtual and the real is the light of imagination, an emotive sense of being, beyond words, almost beyond representation. Tony Stallard’s Night Watch also situates the viewer somewhere between a conscious and unconscious place. A thread of neon awareness cuts through the darkness and recedes towards the horizon of disappearance; ‘the mercurial possibilities of light…both natural and synthetic.’ Jessica Loseby’s Animated Light revisits the magic of light as a totem in cultural narratives. An agent in protection, revelation and the illumination of memory, light weaves it’s enchantment through domestic scenes where, ‘the viewer may control what is revealed.’ And at the other end of the spectrum Steve Rowley’s Have you ever been…? oscillates between questions of representation and truth in a culture dislocated by mass media and the production of an armchair ‘reality.’ The authenticity of visual experience is destabilized in the relay between knowing and seeing.

Spectrum illuminates the plurality of light, in all it’s cultural diversity. As such the spectators’ perceptions of light will shift between pieces and across exhibitions, ‘an illuminated continuity of space between the viewer and the artwork,’ as the event now approaches its third incarnation.