Light Alchemy Show
A Show curated by Felixe Rives and Cassia Glynn Bray supported by Kudos Gallery exhibited at Woodburn Creatives Waterloo 13-20th of September 2023.
Artists: Abi Montgomery, Andy Dickerson, Anika Campbell, Cassia Glynn Bray, Elijah El Kahale, and Felixe Rives
All photographs on this post is by Liam Black.
The impact light has on us psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually is immense: vital to not only how we see the world, light has shaped our understanding of it. Ancient civilisations observed and studied the movements of the sun and other light- giving celestial bodies, building religions, monuments, and myths to explain and venerate them. Biblical texts associate light with Heaven, truth, and purity, and in the European Age of Enlightenment this idea continued with lights’ symbolism of reason and logic. Disillusioned Romantic artists yearned to capture a light both purifying and sublime throughout the nineteenth century, while photographers and filmmakers delved into lights’ avant-garde potential. Today in the twenty-first century industrialisation and technological advancements mean instruments that generate, translate and manipulate light are more accessible to the artist than ever before.
Light Alchemy hones in on lights’ connection to spirituality and the psyche in a contemporary world shaped by growing alienation, displacement, technology, media, and mass-production. Bodies of work within the show find sublime qualities within the mundane, embody experiences of displacement, virtually merge spirituality with technology, examine death and an afterlife in the digital era, and generate interactive temporal hymns. Through a variety of techniques including shadows and optical illusions, colour, virtual reality, sound, and motion capture in play with the effervescent formal qualities of light an ethereal and immersive sensory experience is created for the audience to explore.
FELIXE RIVES Artifice (series) (2023)
Felixe Rives explores connections between the human body and the objects we surround ourselves with in our daily mundane life. For this work she focuses on glass objects using diffraction of light to reveal the uniqueness of each piece of glass. These shadows bring out an organic unique presence to each of the mass-produced pieces, which Felixe parallels to the uniqueness of the object due to their experience, relationships and interaction with the human body and the memories they have captured.
These ideas live in conversation with the Japanese folklore tale of Tukumogami, in which after having served their owners for over 100 years objects receive souls, becoming self-aware and capable of causing mischief. This idea that being regularly interacted with over time grants objects a spiritual presence and life of their own is compelling - the clothes we wear, the utensils and vessels we feed ourselves with, the tools we rely upon are not just instruments at our disposal, but able to know, remember, and respond to us as well.
By illuminating a series of identical looking wine glasses, the uniqueness of each individual is revealed through its’ shadow and can be appreciated and explored by the viewer. Bringing the audience and the shadows into the same space through an immersive installation brings forth a dream-like state and opens up a poetic world in which the objects that fill our lives are far from inanimate.
ANIKA CAMPBELL Chapel of Virtual Heaven (2023)
Anika Campbell’s work Chapel of Virtual Heaven (2023) is the exploration of a speculative, alternative world. The construction of abstracted, fictional spaces aim to showcase the possible evolution of religion in the digital age. Influenced by the writings on the Religion of Technology by David Noble, the mythology of Chapel of the Virtual Heaven focuses on the deity known as The Oracle, a fictionalised god of digital knowledge that constructs the world around the audience and guides them through the digital landscape. Inspired by the works of Jess Johnson and Hilma Af Klint, Anika has created an original symbolic language and pantheon of deities,
The creation of this alternative world is achieved through 3D animation and LED lighting. Within these animations, the dream-like, sacred spaces show the possible futures of religion in the site of the digital, making the virtual a sacred space.
ELIJAH EL KAHALE Tombstone Memory-Loss (2023)
Tombstone Memory-Loss (2023) In the age of digital reproduction, our image has left its imprint, furthering the shape of the shared virtual space, where our demonstration of self-expression in its current nature is transferred through a screen. The screen becomes the display portal for history, and like all things material, data also faces deterioration over time. The preservation of memory - as practised by humanity in tandem with the natural course of decay - edits the story of human life through its participation in the media space.
These are LED- laminated photo-sculptures likened to prospective tombstones; a decaying relic of the future’s begotten past. Within them are images that resemble photographic memory loss - like a visual representation of experiencing conditions such as dementia materialised to present the decaying sense of familiarity.
The tombstones involve photo-imaging practices indicative of technologies in disjunction to the progression of time. This body of work aims not to present the finality of death. Rather, the infinite authorship in unison with nature’s course and the progression of man-made technology to assist the longevity of temporal memory.
CASSIA GLYNN BRAY The holding/haunting (2023)
Amid uncertain territory Cassia Glynn Bray’s creative practice weaves together literal and figurative scraps and traces to explore embodied experiences of intergenerational displacement from an in-between autoethnographic standpoint.
Cassia describes her heritage as “a vortex of displacement” inadvertently converging on Gadigal land: matrilineally Jewish, her mother’s mother landed in Sydney a refugee during World War 2 while her paternal grandmother came as a ward of the Northern Territory Chief Protector of Aborigines. The ripples of these overlapping histories of displacement have stretched across time to meet the artist today, gestating questions of connection, absence, love, longing, and distance under her skin.
Drawing on the words of Julietta Singh and Brenda L. Croft, and the work of Kapawani Kiwanga and Jonathan Jones, The holding/haunting (2023) is a gathering of human-sized abstract woven bodies and infinity mirror bodies. The relationships within this gathering shift and renegotiate with the motions and reflections of the figures and audience. These sculptural installations utilise weaving processes, trace gathering, and visual strategies of abstraction to invoke both the holding and the haunting potential of the body archive.
ABI MONTGOMERY There’s Nothing Better than a Big Knob (2023)
Abigail Montgomery is an emerging artist about to start her honours year in a Bachelors of Fine Arts. Her practice explores the theory of networks through multi- disciplinary, interactive sculptural installations. By focusing on what connects us, Abigail seeks to make work that focuses audiences on the possible aspects of each of our lives that we regularly overlook or underappreciated.
There’s Nothing Better than a Big Knob (2023) explores the ways in which sound waves can be transformed and translated through different formats e.g digital to analog, from voltage to changes in air pressure, yet still stay consistent enough to be reproduced back into recognisable audible form. By using the simplest waveform, a sine wave, the work seeks to allow the audience to explore the foundational principles of how audio works.
ANDY DICKERSON, ELIJAH EL KAHALE, ABI MONTGOMERY Luminescent Sonar (2023) - This work is a sound based work.
As light fills spaces bringing objects into our awareness, sounds bring a kind of universal awareness to one’s own position and distance within an environment. Luminescent Sonar (2023), allows individuals’ movements to introduce different tonal variations of recorded lights. The audience's interactions create varying sound compositions as sampled audio blends together through the positioning and movements of the audience. As the physicality produces sonic movements, the ambience of the space is altered. Much like the way light focuses one’s awareness on their surroundings, it also gives back control of their navigation.