March 24 – April 15, 2018
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.
Lux is curated by Shauna McCabe and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
Image: Blaine Campbell & Megan Wilson, Chase, 2011, digital video, 1:17 (looped)