Art made with light is having a moment, with pioneers of California Light and Space getting their due and cutting-edge technology putting new effects at the disposal of today's artists. In this five-part series, we look at the connections between past and present, as well as investigating the challenges of creating and trading in works from this challenging genre of work.
Light continues to be an inspiring medium for emerging artists looking, as their forebears did, to tap into its mystical and scientific properties. But these artists are less interested in the formal aspects of light than they are in what this medium enables them to convey. Some use it to explore scientific properties (Conrad Shawcross) or to create poetic dispatches to, or from, the universe (Katie Paterson). Rising stars continue to use illumination to engage viewers, whether in playful interactive works (Camille Utterback) or in immersive settings by joining light with sound for an atmosphere redolent of a 90s night club (Haroon Mirza). Others aim to transform everyday items like chairs and doorframes into dangerous and confounding objects (Ivan Navarro). While the newer generation of artists is opting for digital technology, LED tape, or the more prosaic halogen over the neon and fluorescents of their predecessors, their work explores light’s experiential possibilities while suggesting a more expansive narrative of communication and interconnectedness.
Katie Paterson
Scottish artist Katie Paterson won viewers over when she offered them a lifetime supply of moonlight. Her 2008 work,“Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight,” consisted of a bare blue halogen bulb hanging in a darkened gallery enshrouded in a mysterious glow. The bulb, which was specially produced to replicate the qualities of moonlight, comes with a lifetime's supply (289 bulbs, each one lasting 2,000 hours) of these blue bulbs. That was just after Paterson graduated from the Slade School of Art. Soon after, the artist showed her work in Canada, Sweden, and France, and took part in Altermodern: Tate Trienniale 2009, in London, and New York’s Performa 09. She’s been picked up by James Cohan Gallery in New York where she had a solo exhibition in 2011, and Ingleby Gallery in Scotland where she’ll have her first solo show in 2014.
Though Paterson’s work is multi-disciplinary, it often involves the sun, moon, or stars as well as a team of scientists. For one of her first major works, “Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon (2007),” Paterson transformed Beethoven’s famed sonata into Morse code, bounced those signals off the moon, retrieved the signals, and translated them back into musical notes and had them programmed into a player piano. In 2010, for “Streetlight Storm,” Paterson caused lights along Deal Pier, in Kent, UK, to flicker in time with live lightning storms happening around the world. And while this artist is known for her use of light, her “lifelong project,” ironically, is called the “History of Darkness,” for which Paterson has been collecting photographic images of some of the darkest points across the universe.
Ivan Navarro
Ivan Navarro is maybe best known for recreating Marcel Breuer’s modernist Wassily Chair from fluorescent light tubes. He’s since created luminescent chairs, doors, and ladders that similarly build on modernist design but with a more edgy end — “You Sit, You Die” (2002) is a chaise longue that suggests you would be electrocuted if you tried to use it. Born in Santiago, Chile, Navarro grew up within the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet with a constant fear of being abducted. Later, as an artist, he turned to light as a hopeful medium, one he used to help him comprehend his country’s history.
“There is a certain amount of fear in my pieces,” he once said. If you look into one of his light-filled boxes, or doorframes, what you’ll encounter is a series of bulbs of a uniform color that appear, thanks to mirrors, to reproduce infinitely, carrying your gaze into a seemingly endless abyss. A 2007 doorframe work, “Dead End,” sold at Phillips in New York in 2008 for $97,000. The artist, who is represented by Paul Kasmin in New York and is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. among other private and public collections, represented Chile in the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Conrad Shawcross
Conrad Shawcross got his first big career bump when collector Charles Saatchi snapped up one of his works (a functioning loom that was a metaphorical take on the nervous system) and included it in the show “New Blood” in 2004, one year after Shawcross graduated from Slade School of Art in London. That same year, the London-based artist created “Light Perpetual I,” one of his earliest lightworks. Situated in a mesh cage and constructed from a light bulb affixed to an articulated arm that rotates at the speed of 200rpm, the oak, steel, and light contraption creates through its fluctuations a lighted illusory shape that floats in space. In this model of String Theory, Shawcross attempts to show that matter is composed of continuous loops of energy, as opposed to individual particles.
Shawcross’s poetic feats of luminescent engineering have since been shown at the Pace Gallery in New York, the National Gallery in London, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris among many other galleries and museums worldwide. While his contraptions are often noted for their intricate Rube Goldberg-type functionality, they also often instill the spirit and feel of space exploration as well as hark back to the kinetic works of Jean Tinguely. In 2008, Shawcross was named by UK publication the Observer as among the 80 young artists who would define the countries culture, politics, and economics for the 21st century.
Camille Utterback
Camille Utterback is best known for her interactive sculptural installations, which employ light, architecture, and digital software to engage participants in kinetic play. For one of her first interactive works, “Text Rain” (1999), which she created with Israeli artist Romy Achituv, participants stand in front of a large lighted screen onto which they see a projection of themselves along with colorful animated falling letters. Moving their bodies, people can engage with the tumbling alphabet on the screen, by collecting the letters, spelling words, or simply letting them fall onto their arms and fingers. Trained as a painter, but earning her masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Utterback’s fusion of traditional artistic mediums with digital media have made her a favorite choice for public art projects.
“Aurora Organ,” was a 2009 public project at the Showplace Theaters in St. Louis where six columns of light were strung up over the main stairway entrance, and the hand railings were outfitted with glass sensors that responded to peoples’ touch, causing painterly bursts of color in the hanging rods and transforming the small gestures of theater-goers into architectural patterns of light. She had her first major museum exhibition earlier this year at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennesee. Utterback's work has also been shown at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, American Museum of the Moving Image, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. In 2002, Utterback picked up a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship as well as a Whitney Museum commission for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website. Solidifying her status as an artist to keep an eye on, in 2009, Utterback was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.
Haroon Mirza
LED lights — in particular, the kind you’d see in a shop window — have become something of a regular feature of Haroon Mirza’s installation environments, which otherwise include sound and the things that produce them like old TVs, speakers, and record players. Stumbling upon one of his works is something like walking into a rave deconstructed into its component parts: sound, light, beats. Mirza, who is also a DJ, first garnered attention for his sound works, in particular “Anthemoessa” — an installation that included vintage record players, radios, projected film clips, and a Victorian painting — for which he won the 2011 Northern Art Prize in the UK. Later that year, at the 54th Venice Biennale, Mirza’s piece “The National Apavilion of Then and Now” — a sound-proof chamber in which an analog drone increased in volume as a glowing ring of light intensified until both suddenly shut off enveloping the viewers in silent darkness — was awarded the Silver Lion, the Biennale’s recognition for a promising young artist. He currently has a show at Lisson Gallery in London, and will be included in upcoming exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art.
To be fair, a multimedia work like Mirza's Venice project goes somewhat beyond the classification of “light art” — but that itself shows how far the kind of immersive, perception-bending installations pioneered in the '60s and '70s have expanded the frontiers of what we call art, and become part of the contemporary vocabulary. For today's artists, illumination has become just one element to use among others, one color of paint in their palette.
To see images connected to the works mentioned in this article, click on the slideshow.