Curated By Jonathan Judd
With Special Thanks to BFP Creative LLC.
Saturday, March 26th ~ Saturday, April 23rd, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 26th, 5 – 8 pm
Participating Artists:
CHIKA
Rachel Chatham
Yun-Woo Choi
Sunil Garg
Takafumi Ide
Cornelia Jensen
Mieko Mitachi
William Norton
Carol Salmanson
Kirsten Kay Thoen
Andrea Wolf
Natalia Zubko
The WAH Center takes on the continuing and transformative role of light as a structuring formal element in contemporary art with WAH: Light, Form, and Symbol. With this exhibition, we look to open up a critical space for the evaluation and consideration of the aesthetic incorporation of lighting technology in art. This continues the WAH Center’s technology and art exhibition series, moving from sound with WAH: A New Diversity to light. Ostensibly, this collection of work deals with the use of lighting apparatuses as a purely formal aspect of the art. However, what also becomes manifestly true is lights symbolic and conceptual dimensions: the works explore, overall, the ways in which light structures our perceptions of reality.
Adding depth and form to our experience, light comes in to transform the evental moment: traumatic and blaring, soft and sensual, sweeping, dizzying and sublime; light transforms and transmutes. With this exhibition we explore more than just the use of lighting technology as a formal aspect of the work. We also explore the symbolic and discursive significance light signals as a multi-valent term and concept of and in itself. And wrapped up in all this a certain evolution and transmutation of the sculptural object can be seen within “light art.”
The chosen works incite a multi-level interrogation: How is light being used as a formal approach? What does it add to the works presence as an aesthetic object? How does light become a symbolic gesture towards a larger personal or societal narrative? In answering these questions we find that light transforms and transmutes; it builds on and reflects the rapid procession of new technology and new social understandings. We have here, then, a momentous relation between subject and object, human and technology: Light, Form and Symbol.
Images: Takafumi Ide, Natalia Zubko, Kristen Kay Thoen, Yun-Woo Choi, CHIKA, Carol Salmanson, Sunil Garg and Cornelia Jensen
Review essay by Jania Vanderwerff
Opening Reception Video
Artist’s Talk Video
Below are some previous works by participating artists.
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