LIGHT on the MATTER - EXHIBITION AT ART & COMMON SPACE

Art & Common Space Spring 2015:
Each semester Art and Common Space engages in a practical art/architecture project that culminates in an exhibition. Sometimes this is in response to a specific commission, for instance from schools in Frøya (2013) and Halsa (2014), and at other times it takes on the character of a more experimental workshop (but, equally, coming together in an exhibition or publication, or both). This semester we have chosen light, as both metaphor, material and medium as the theme for this research and production.
Beside practical design and aesthetic concerns around light as a shaping force in formal practices as diverse as painting, sculpture, art installation, architecture, and production of space more generally, the project have had a theoretical dimension drawing on the philosophy of light as metaphorical and metaphysical bearer of `truth`, illumination, and knowledge production. Its political implications, for instance regarding lighting of public space, surveillance, exposure and secrecy have also been considered through lectures and discussion forums. This week we open the exhibition:

Light on the Matter

Opening: Friday May 22 at 18:00
Opening hours: Saturday May 23 & Sunday May 24 from 12:00-16:00

Eva Margrethe Ballo
Carlos Alberto Correia
Anne-Karin Furunes
Simon Harvey
Inger Margrethe Hove Laustsen
Adi Dukic
Aida Miron
Enrique Rotura
Shayla Macdonald
Amanda Trygg

"Imagine a light exhibition seen through the eyes of a cat. The luminous works don’t register as art, rather, simply, as bare stimuli. If the light dances it becomes a potential plaything, or even prey. If not, its rays barely trouble its mind; the cat’s retinal screen apparently saving it unnecessary expenditure of energy. We, on the other hand want something more from these light sources: we want them to be artworks. We stand before them in contemplation, and if we don’t immediately identify something the stimuli does more work behind the retina. This is the moment that lumen, the straightforward light of the big bang that illuminates the surface of things and bounces off towards our eyes, becomes lux, an inner illumination and understanding.

-We should, then, perhaps approach a light exhibition with an open mind, so to speak, and a receptive body. It is sometimes forgotten that an exhibition is a sensory experience as much as it is about contemplation. People, light, artworks, architecture – the psychological and physical experience of an exhibition (any exhibition) - are mutually constituted.

Here, in this Art and Common Space exhibition, there is creative emergence, and light is in a state of becoming: it not only infiltrates other works but is also never entirely circumscribed by discrete and static notions of lumen and lux. Light is neither here nor there: like Shrödinger’s cat, until the box is opened, its being is indeterminate. The precise whereabouts of light, at any given moment, is unknown, but our experience of it all the more rich and complex for it."

(Extract from Simon Harvey's text; 'The Locus of Lumen and Lux')