Somerville_Magazine_V4.pdf

caa.reviews, 2019

Stepping off the elevator on the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, an expansive canvas, Untitled (White Inner Band), by artist Mary Corse (b. 1945) captivates with a subdued brilliance. Its surface of pale vertical bands shimmers in response to the ambient light. If you are a seasoned art viewer but new to the experience of Corse's work, your thoughtful pause may begin to draw comparisons with analogous minimal painters (e.g., Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman). However, those comparisons dissolve with your next step. Movement toward the show's title wall produces a surprising effect: the vertical bands appear and disappear relative your mobility. The body in motion produces an optical experience of becoming and disappearing. "What material conjures this strange magic?" you may wonder. An awareness of light as a material presence and its ties to subjective experience come to mind. This guttural reaction lies at the heart of Corse's impressive body of work, which is directly engaged with technological experimentation and subjective experience.

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Thomas Wilfred

American Romanticism and the Idea of Light, 2010

This thesis argues that the technical and aesthetic appropriation of light in American Romantic literature draws on a network of relations between time, space and subjectivity that is specifically linked to the invention of photography. It argues that, after the Enlightenment, after its advances in the scientific comprehension of light and colour, there followed a comprehensive philosophical and artistic re-evaluation of light and its properties. The appropriation and mediation of light by art in this period is informed by new understandings of its reflective and colouring properties, and directed by new constructions of the relation of light to darkness. Most significantly, the thesis describes a relocation of the creative power of light from God to the artist and the individual, and an incumbent transformation of its association with omniscience towards new notions of individualism, subjectivity and perspectivism. It argues for the historical and the technical specificity of photographic processes, and so for photographies over photography. Part of the exploration of this specificity entails an enquiry into the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth picturesque mode, and the specific dynamics that it initiated between the observer and the observed across several arts. Similarly, the thesis argues that Daguerreotypy, when properly understood as a medium of art, has a critical role in the reconfiguration of relations between the arts specifically related to a new, intermediary idea of light. It concludes that the American picturesque mode is fundamental to the appropriation of ‘photographic’ techniques in the visual writing of the period and, more specifically, shows that Daguerreotypy actuates the American Romantic way of seeing and describing.

Over the past two decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in the world of light art and design with the introduction of LED technology. Sydney-based artists Ruth McDermott and Ben Baxter have been on the vanguard of this movement, creating innovative and award-winning installation artworks utilizing the capabilities of this new technology. A frequent highlight of the Vivid Sydney light art festival, their work has become known for creating site-specific narratives exploring the landscapes and histories of Sydney and its surrounds. This book surveys twelve years of their practice (2009-2021), as their work evolved in tandem with the technology, with a special focus on the technical aspects of creating, mounting, and displaying large-scale installations. Along with an essay on the history of light art, commentary from collaborators, and over 100 photographs documenting the conceptual life span of eighteen artworks, this book features the authors reflections on the unique relations...

Leonardo, 2020

Making visible the invisible in nature and culture has been the focus of the author's work since 1973. In the early 1970s, experimental approaches were being explored in art and photography. At that time, the author investigated imaging possibilities using a range of approaches, from making photographic images without a camera or enlarger to using light-sensitive emulsions, Xerox machines, and computer and X-ray technology available in the 1970s in order to explore the potential for light to make visible form in nature. Unexpectedly, this exploration also resulted in social content that was the outcome of the author's work, the exhibition Multicultural Focus. This period was the beginning of the artist's ongoing investigation into the transformative potential of light.

On Rose Garrard, feminist spatial poetics, art. activism and Garrard's life-long practice.

MPhil Thesis, 2006