Light : The Other Architecture : Explorations in Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

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Light : The Other Architecture

Painters have expanded upon a vision of light as vibrating particles and oscillations, conveyed through radiant pigments and a textured impasto lain on with brushwork. The grainy and colourful light they composed is never static, reflecting knowledge that light is like nothing else that enters our world, seeming to never come to rest and always in motion.

Even in the figural pictures of Edward Hopper, we find a light free of the objects with which it mingles.

Whether as a wave of sun spreading over the land, or a sunbeam piercing a dark room. Hopper made the light around the people he painted an evanescent force with which they commune, and seems to be saying that these simple encounters might help to soothe the existential loneliness of the modern citizen.

Henry Plummer, 2009.

For Philippe Dubois, the frame of the photography does not merely contain an imaged field, but is like a cutting device which is inflicted on the subject under the camera's gaze.

 

Unlike the constructive formation of the act of painting, in which detail is built up to fit within its pre-existing and limiting frame, the photograph depends on the coupe: its image is not produced, but deduced, cut out from its surroundings, in a reductive act of soustraction, of decoupage, of sampling, detachment and isolation.

Mary Sabbatino reads Mendieta's placement of the glass on her skin as a radical adjustment of the 'classic window in modernism', as the artist used the device to direct the spectatorial gaze onto her body.

Collapsing onto the flesh the window through which the ideally disembodied modernist gaze is controlled and tamed, Mendieta drew attention to the conditions of viewing in which the spectator is embroiled, elucidating the gaze here as one that fragments its object.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity, 

Glass : Modernist framing device directing the a spectatorial gaze/Photographic act of a cutting process inflicted on the subject under the cameras gaze.

Filtered Light : 

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention.

The positive image is produced out of absence, by the shadow cast on the surface of the negative.

A space haunted by the feminine absence and often naked, faceless, blurred and decapitated by the image's framing within the photographic process.

Her body and its framing of/by violence of the processes of negative to positive are implicit in her constant use of serial imagery and repeated motifs.

Bodies in space/Spatial Practice/Agency.

Spatial Theory, Triads, Thinking, Making, Being Seen, Others.

Architectural Body : Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Tactility (Entangled intertwining of vision and movement ) depends on the skin rather than the eye.

The act of viewing becomes its own adventure.

Attenuated moments (actualities), instances, periods between things.

The spatial representations of Francesca Woodman and Gordon Matta-Clark.

The artist's book, reading, re-reading and reacting to the existing pages, texts and time.

Art book/the forgotten book as an example of a micro, instance of the larger spatial practice, activated through the performance of the body, hands taping the pictures, thumbing through pages and writing annotations.

The concept of seeing the seeing is a synthesis of the artist's body and viewers bodies in space together.