Showing posts with label light. Show all posts
Showing posts with label light. Show all posts
WANDSTUCK
KARIN SANDER
Wandstück, 1985–86
Akademie der bildenden Künste Stuttgart
Wandfarbe geschliffen
21 x 29,7 cm
courtesy of Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin
Akademie der bildenden Künste Stuttgart
Wandfarbe geschliffen
21 x 29,7 cm
courtesy of Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin
PLAZA DEL TORICO
An old favourite of mine has caught my eye again; the Plaza del Torico by B720. The project uses large 'cobbles' with a pattern of embedded luminescent strips to create a delicate atmosphere while avoiding an excessively dominant illumination. The light, understood as a fluid element, spreads throughout the square but with variations: around the Torico fountain (encircled by luminous lines), the Fondero and Somero cisterns, and the Arca Secreta (where the density of the lines is reduced by half, to stress the archaeological value of these points).
The square is organised longitudinally by lines that accentuate the perspective, constructed with linear lighting systems in the porticos and facades, two conduits for installations on the exterior of the porticos, to eliminate the cables that until now have been attached to the facades.
The lighting project is completed by the installation of lights concealed within the Torico fountain (which can change colour on special occasions). Thus, the existing lighting, essentially vertical, gives way to a more horizontal arrangement.
And then there is the underside...
The square is organised longitudinally by lines that accentuate the perspective, constructed with linear lighting systems in the porticos and facades, two conduits for installations on the exterior of the porticos, to eliminate the cables that until now have been attached to the facades.
The lighting project is completed by the installation of lights concealed within the Torico fountain (which can change colour on special occasions). Thus, the existing lighting, essentially vertical, gives way to a more horizontal arrangement.
STUDIO CONSTRUCTS
Studio Construct 15, 2007, Archival pigment print, 43.75x53.75 in
Studio Construct 8, 2007, Archival pigment print, 43.75x53.75 in
Studio Construct 17, 2007
"The process of capturing an image through a camera lens requires “an object.” This body of work addresses the representational value of that object. By photographing a transparent plane, and its shadow, familiar association with life experience is eliminated. The result is a “concrete photographic” abstract image." - Barbara Kasten
Regarding her recent solo exhibition, Abstracting…Light, held at the wonderful Almine rech Gallery in France in May-June 2010, Karsten wrote that:
The occurrence of light hitting a plane is distinctive from the recording of the same light thru the lens of a camera. A unique vision occurs through the optical prism that can be captured and ultimately printed, yet cannot be seen by the naked eye. As I directed light on various parts of transparent planes and studied it in the back of a view camera, multicolored abrasions activating the surface appeared. The scratches become a color field of drawing over a normally invisible sheet of plastic. The perception of a ‘thing’, a recordable reality of representation, is basic to the photographic process. In the series “Incidence”, the rendering of light becomes abstract interpretation of surface and form. However, I do not think of the photograph’s construction in terms of abstraction but as an event. Many abstract notions are conjured up as we view this unique recording of materiality. The synthesis of abstract form and our imagination presents a means of seeing the process of lighting. This phenomenon is the subject of my new work and exhibit ‘abstracting…light’.
The occurrence of light hitting a plane is distinctive from the recording of the same light thru the lens of a camera. A unique vision occurs through the optical prism that can be captured and ultimately printed, yet cannot be seen by the naked eye. As I directed light on various parts of transparent planes and studied it in the back of a view camera, multicolored abrasions activating the surface appeared. The scratches become a color field of drawing over a normally invisible sheet of plastic. The perception of a ‘thing’, a recordable reality of representation, is basic to the photographic process. In the series “Incidence”, the rendering of light becomes abstract interpretation of surface and form. However, I do not think of the photograph’s construction in terms of abstraction but as an event. Many abstract notions are conjured up as we view this unique recording of materiality. The synthesis of abstract form and our imagination presents a means of seeing the process of lighting. This phenomenon is the subject of my new work and exhibit ‘abstracting…light’.
Barbara Kasten's Construct's are currently on show at London's Carl Freedman Gallery alongside the work of Alexanda Leykauf and at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in The Edge of Vision Exhibition. The Studio Constructs are perhaps her most muted works - concerned more with the transparency and fleeting physicality of the space as compared with the colour of her earlier work. This depicts a clear turning point for Karsten, from the Moholy-Nagy/Bauhaus influence towards the use of light a la James Turrell. Other artists using similar methods of constructed environments and photography include Eileen Quinlan (whose work I also adore) and Sara VanderBeek.
IT TREMBLES TO CARESS THE LIGHT
James Casebere: La Alberca, 2005/2006
Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection
Epilogue
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
i want to make
something imagined not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything i write
With the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot
lurid rapid garish grouped
heightened from life
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts.
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
-robert Lowell
-robert Lowell
The painter's vision is not a lens except, in the case of James Casebere, when it is. At the same time, it is relatively easy to say that his images are heightened from life/yet paralysed by fact. His images trounce the real, they are contaminated by fiction. Is it photo, is it painting? The illumination characteristic of his work is at its most ambiguous in La Alberca. Here, the combination of the abstract, shallow reflective pool of water melts all solidity, returning the physical to its liquid state. The source of illumination is not clear - we are contained in the gestural space.
Flooded Hallway 1999 - Casebere
farmer woman (Milk maid) - Vermeer
Discussing La Alberca in terms of Lowell's Epilogue points to a perceived correlation between Vermeer and Casebere. It is notable that Vermeer's work nearly always contains a window - an explicit announcement of the how and why light enters. Casebere, conversely, is not concerned with the entry of light, but with the what the illumination allows. However, this distinction is not as clear as it might appear. Both artists are obsessed with how light returns the eye to reality - both artists tremble to caress the light. For Vermeer, painting the incredibly everyday Milkmaid was a subject of both stark reality and highly institutionalised myth. His illumination works to bring together these two isolated views. For Casebere the same is true - light folds together the reality of space and the myth that physical material alone is form giving.
via Carol Diehl
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