Lux
Shauna McCabe
For centuries, artists have engaged light as both a medium and optical phenomenon, exploring the visual effects of illumination. The three digital installations presented here activate the intensity of light – lux – whether radiating from a light source or reflected from surfaces of imagined forms. Artists Blaine Campbell and Megan Wilson’s Chase is a lavish rendering of the ornate thousand-pound crystal chandelier within Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre, a glowing apparition with a multitude of crystal facets catching and refracting light in ever-changing patterns as its progresses through an endless on-off cycle. Toronto-based Alex McLeod’s Gold Section 3/3 and Cologne-based Bran_cuzi’s Circus represent animated environments, spaces that fill with the light of reflective forms with their gilded silver and gold surfaces. At once concrete and abstract, each work leverages the effects of luminosity – not for the sake of visual excess, but rather exploring the potential of spectacle as a tool of engagement.
Image detail: Blaine Campbell & Megan Wilson, Chase, 2011, digital video, 1:17 (looped)
Lux is presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
Artists
Blaine Campbell & Megan Wilson
Alex McLeod
Bran_cuzi
View More Exhibitions
exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
This work chronicles the artist’s experience of pregnancy amid reports of high maternal mortality rates experienced by Black women in the U.S.
exhibition
January 19.2023 / May 14.2023
The first exhibition to explore pioneering feminist artist Mary Kelly’s long engagement with activist movements.
exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
Connecting aspects of Indigenous cosmology to wider cultural meanings, this exhibition speaks to the idea of seeing through space.
exhibition
January 19.2023 / May 14.2023
This exhibition speaks to the connections between art and social activism and to the visual aesthetics that emerge from protest.
exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
Taking root during pandemic lockdowns, this installation acknowledges loss while offering a space for grief and mourning.
exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
Curated by Middlebrook Prize recipient Erin Szikora, Homecoming engages land, language, and community, offering strategies to rethink our relationships to home.
exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
Examining intersections between botanical explorations and colonization, Anahita Norouzi focuses on the plant colloquially referred to as giant hogweed.
exhibition
September 14.2022 / December 31.2022
This exhibition of Haudenosaunee souvenir beadworks responds to the history of ethnographic collecting by celebrating personal, economic, and cultural value.