1708 Gallery

CLIFF BALDWIN, Aquebogue, NY
Language of Light, 2012
Live mix

The Language of Light explodes and examines the words and language associated with man-made and natural light. TLOL fuses Music from the Aquebogue Orchestrion with words and images that celebrate light in all its myriad manifestations. The Aquebogue Orchestrion is a
digital musical instrument that provides the soundtrack as light and color are coupled with musical pipes, whistles, crumpled metal, scraping tin cans and hurdy gurdys. Simultaneously derived from Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus Light and Space Modulator, George Maciunas' graphic genius, Paik, Sharits, Méliés, Jacobs, Brakhage and Ono, this piece paraphrases carousels, broadsides and early film and video experimenters.

Cliff Baldwin

CHRISTIE BLIZARD, Lubbock, TX
Lightsabers (to benefit Morris Safe House no-kill animal shelter), 2012
Paint, acetate, batteries, LED lights, tape

I embrace the social role of the artist through public interventions and by making work that is
either free or sold for donations for local charities and thus extending the work into a larger political and social field. Aesthetically, my work draws from a number of influences including early video games, traditional textile design, and the role of poetry. The idea of "neti neti" or "not this, not that," a Sanskrit expression for the sacred, resonates in my personal practice. Through sustained experimentation and this process of negation, I intend to evoke slippages in relationships between objects and their context. I am compelled by how things are different and how this difference attempts to point to faults in certain power structures.

Christie Blizard

NIGHTHOUSE: ELAINE BUCKHOLTZ + FLOOR VAN DER VELDE, Jamaica Plain, MA
Score for Diamond Wall, 2012
Video projection, light, and sound

"I want to create an atmosphere, one that can be plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thoughts that come from looking into a fire."
-James Turrell

Nighthouse's work explores the medium of video, light, and sound as ephemeral phenomena and as interventions to unmask hidden aspects of architectural forms and landscapes that remain hidden in the light and chaos of the day. We are interested in poetic renderings that infuse space with image, light, and sound. In the last several years we have been responding to sites that the public can experience in unexpected and familiar places. Interfacing with sites to create quiet spectacles as a place for wonder is at the center of Nighthouse's current body of work.

Nighthouse

JOHANNA EVAN-COLLEY, Brooklyn, NY
Camera, Paper, Light, Pin, 2012
HD Video

Camera, Paper, Light, Pin responds to and is inspired by ideas of light, technology, and artifice. As the first tiny points of light appear, they allude to stars and the universe, creating and re-creating patterns and shapes. They also suggest pixels, digital technology, and film. As
more points of light come together and the video unfolds, the actual process of the piece is
revealed, as my hand and the light source become visible.

Camera, Paper, Light, Pin simultaneously destroys while it creates; it presents an
illusion while also divulging its process. Other conflicting notions are explored: the
celestial/mundane, high/low tech, perfect/imperfect. These dualities and tensions
between opposing forces inform my practice.

Johanna Evan-Colley

TANNAZ FARSI, Eugene, OR
Crowd Control, 2012
Fluorescent lights, aluminum, steel, wire, ballast

I am interested in the form of a crowd control barrier in its metaphoric opposite—one where
the light illuminates the edge of difference between one side and the other in absence of the people that generally define the parameter of this object. In recent years, my work has dealt
with language and objects used in political protests through the use of installation and
sculpture. In this particular piece, the delineation of a recognizable form with light allows me to manifest the perceptual and emotional aspects associated with specific objects that comprise the visual vocabulary of conflict. In translating the physical space of conflict through the abstract form of a divide, I am interested in revisiting the history of sculpture as a marker or memorial through a time-based gesture.

Tannaz Farsi

REBECCA A. FERRELL, Richmond, VA
Copy and Paste, 2010
Choreographed dance, video projection
Video by Todd A. Raviotta

As an intervention dance artist, I create experiences that are participatory, unpredictable, and potentially scandalous. I achieve this most frequently by situating private experiences in public spaces.

Copy and Paste is a solo dance piece illuminated only by projection. This work was
inspired by the multiple female stereotypes shown in the media. The video for this work,
created by Richmond filmmaker Todd A. Raviotta, was constructed using only images
from 24 hours of television programming. Instead of using a heavy lighting plot, I stripped all light sources from the performance space leaving only a projector on stage, thus symbolizing the array of projections set on society through the media and layering personal projections with literal ones.

Rebecca A. Ferrell

THE TRILLIONS: CHARLIE GLENN, CHRIS SMITH, ROBBIE KING, JOE FERGUSON, Richmond, VA
Live performance, lights, electronics

We are The Trillions. We have created a device into which we plug our instruments, and for
each note or beat played, a simultaneous electrical output illuminates an instrument-specific light source. The audience can "see" the separate parts being played at any point in the performance, even for improvised segments. Our device can be used with any variety of light, and in theory, with any instrument. Our InLight set includes many types of electric lights, filters, and photo-luminescent set pieces to create our extemporaneous light and sound event. We will also have another of our devices connected to other instruments and lights so that the audience may experiment and create their own music/light events.

The Trillions

NORBERTO GOMEZ, JR., Richmond, VA
BYOB – Richmond, 2012
Participatory event

A campfire illuminates with jumping flames. The results: shadow-play, campfire songs, the deep, slow stares, and smells of burning wood. The slow media of being-there is not a war against technology, but an acknowledgement of both the parts and the whole. Toggle the light switch, on and off, off and on. Know your neighborhood by deeply-listening and deep-see diving. Bring your own beamer, RVA.
-Norberto Gomez, Jr.

BYOB is a series of one-night exhibitions hosting artists and their beamers (projectors). All artists are invited to show work during BYOB-RVA, with the only requirement being they provide their own projector, or source, and work. Installation is free-form, with artists reacting to the space and their fellow beamers throughout the night. First initiated by Rafaël Rozendaal in 2010, over 80 BYOB events have taken place throughout the world, from Berlin and Tokyo, to San Francisco and New York City.

Norberto Gomez, Jr.

NATHAN GORGEN, Columbus, OH
Aspirations Illuminated, 2012
Acrylic on canvas and molding, inkjet print, vinyl flooring, interactive digital projection

In our corporate, media-dominated world, we are provided with an incredible amount of manufactured information. With the incessant, 24-7 news cycle a click away on our smartphones and non-stop commercial bombardment on radios, televisions, and the internet, we face a constant onslaught of slickly-produced "facts." We base our life decisions on this information. This is problematic, as this information is unreliable and easily manipulated.

The intersection of a faux-painted environment and a digital projection is the crux of this piece. Here we observe the transition from faux simulation to digital simulation, which results in the faux environment being taken for "real" even though it is as much of an artifice as the projection. The mechanism for adjusting the digital environment's perspective can only track one viewer at a time, so other viewers will be able to witness the way in which our digital environment can be manipulated to alter our individual perceptions.

Nathan Gorgen

LISA HEIN + ROBERT SENG, Brooklyn, NY
Blue in the Face, 2012
LED icicle lights, neon tubes, lighting gels, and electronic controllers

Blue in the Face is a lighting installation for a double storefront window. It uses the stop-motion
animation style of vintage signs to depict events that are slower than the eye can see. One window is hung with receding curtains of icicle lights. The curtains light in sequence from top to bottom, front to back. A glacier recedes. The other side is linedwith horizontal bands of blue neon. A separate controller lights these lines in sequence from bottom to top. The window fills like an aquarium tank.

Blue in the Face looks abstract at first. It mystifies by behaving like commercial signage without
offering anything to sell. The animation cycles of each light group are different lengths and not synchronized; they collide differently on every round. Economists say a rising tide of development floats all boats. This installation animates the shells left behind when that tide ran out. It also hints at how literal the next influx may be.

Lisa Hein and Robert Seng

NICOLE HERBERT, Harrisburg, PA
Tracing, 2012
White tape

For Tracing, I use thin white tape to trace the outlines of reflections in the windows of a storefront. Depending upon position of the person viewing the work, the relationship of the tape drawing to the reflected view changes. From one vantage point, the tape lines up with the reflection, but in every other position, the tape is out of line, in varying degrees, to what's reflected in the window. The fixed outline of the reflection invites pedestrians to pause in otherwise transitory situations and consider their shifting relationship to the static tape.

My aim is not only to suspend fleeting impressions of familiar objects and contexts, but to also explore how signification can shift when the same object is re-presented in a variety of media. In this regard, I seek to encourage active perceptions of the physical environment by challenging conventional ways of looking. This perceptual shift opens up the possibility for experiencing the world less reflexively and by implication, questions the mechanisms that filter and mediate our experience.

Nicole Herbert

DEVON JOHNSON, Centreville, VA
Noms de Pays, 2012
Super 8mm converted to digital format

Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind… and I am unable to say from what place, from what time—perhaps, quite simply, from which of my dreams—it comes.
- Marcel Proust

I embrace the indiscriminate decay of that relentless conqueror—time, which lays waste to the physical world, as well as to our memories of places. The harder we try to fight it, the more distorted our memory becomes. We only remember the last time we remembered (something that perhaps never was). I am not saddened by the fabricated nature of memory because every time I look to the past, I create a new story in my mind. I can only hope that this tale will get better with time. Each shard of memory has the potential to bring up countless narratives, yet unknown. Where they begin hardly matters—it is where they can make the mind go. Time is the ultimate leveler, something from which nothing ever escapes. I offer up this vision, a memory of a memory, its origins unknown.

Devon Johnson

NELLY KATE + DAVE WATKINS, Richmond, VA
Interstitial Transduction, 2012
Interactive audio visual installation and performance

This is an unsettling of dreams deferred. In this collaboration we aim to pause the ragged
paradigms. To shorten the distance between action and effect. To create something
euphonic and dynamic together in a crowd-affected piece—of sound and video, light and performance—pulsing within the heart of the city. To draw this community inward, where one touch will change everything. To shorten the distance between ourselves, unfolding something common and inspired. To share, coexist, project, create, and progress.

Nelly Kate and Dave Watkins

BRIAN MCLEAN, Smyrna, GA
People Painter, 2012
Paint, lights, plywood

The element of light is ephemeral. With its intangible nature, it can only be experienced, creating an interaction between itself and that which it illuminates. My work activates the space it inhabits, using light to instigate an interaction between sculpture, space, and viewer. The honest use of wood and logical construction is a platform for the viewer's conceptual experience of the work. Through my sculpture, I aim to stimulate an environment causing people to reconsider the spaces they share.

Brian McLean

REBECCA NAJDOWSKI, Berkeley, CA
Infinity Box #2, 2012
Acrylic mirror, electroluminescent wire, wood, paint

Using video, photography, and installation I am investigating disruptions of logic and time and the possibility of transformation. Points of entry are extreme ecologies, ritual practices, and altered states. Recently, I have been exploring the link between art-making and shamanism. As the receivers and transmitters of irrational knowledge, shamans (and artists) slip in and out of perceptual boundaries or logics, keeping the tissue between the familiar and the fathomless pliable.

Infinity Box #2 is a collaboration with my father. It is an updated version of a science fair project that he helped me make in grade school. The lost original consisted of a shoe box, mirror, and a strand of Christmas lights. I focused on recreating a youthful curiosity and wonderment in a new piece. The viewer looks through a hole at the top of the box revealing their eye peering back at them, surrounded by a psychedelic display of infinite electroluminescent lights.

Rebecca Najdowski

VESNA PAVLOVIC, Nashville, TN
Real Images, 2012
Photographic installation

My projects develop as anthropological studies, analyzing different cultures and their visual representations through particular phenomena. I am interested in the experience of history and the changes it brings to society and culture. Issues of taste, aspiration and expectation, the friction of performance, set in different contexts, are some of the themes in my work. Either presented as a photographic print, or as a projected image within installation, the work attempts to reveal the layers constituting the image. The work is concerned with the production of nostalgia, for the photographic medium, its current position, and its obsolete technological objects. Historical, private or public archives, and found imagery are often subjected through a set of translations, which question and confront the photographic representation. The idea of the image—printed or projected, found or constructed, real or imagined—is central to my practice.

Vesna Pavlovic

JASON PETERS, Brooklyn, NY
Meandering Dynamics, 2012
Found buckets, LED lights, cable

In my installations I try to archive a transformative moment, removing the viewer from accustomed modes of thinking and seeing, from the constraints of id and ego, if only for a second. In my abstract works, I operate within the notion of a kind of contemporary sublime. The sublime deals with feelings of fear and awe that one experiences when confronted with things that are dark, mysterious, incomprehensible, and potentially threatening. The sublime gives way to feelings of pleasure and joy when the viewer recognizes that there is no immediate threat.

My sculptures and installations work in precisely this way, initially disorienting the viewer, then giving way to the delight of solving his/her visual puzzles, and enjoying the work's graceful and colorful forms. The materials I use are found and mass-produced. It is looking for these waste streams that gives rise to some great materials and their potential to become something new. Recycling some of these materials allows us to revisit our relationship to items we generally overlook.

Jason Peters

KATE LOUISE PETERSON, New York, NY
Color Study, Ingrid, 2012
Light box and projection

The projection Color Study, Ingrid is an installation with two recorded perspectives: the inner and outer world. I used a digital camera in my closed hand to record the projection. I used an antique large format camera to record "the other" in the light box. The projection is digital yet the flickering is reminiscent of analog film projection and psychedelic experimental film. The light box suggests the painful process of walking outside into bright light after being in darkness. I am interested in the conversation between the two records and their paradox: one lit from within and one reflecting.

Kate Louise Peterson

PHILIP STEARNS, Brooklyn, NY
Aura(I) Study No. 1, 2012
Electronics

I create phenomenological works using light and sound, sometimes together, sometimes independently. Aura(l) Study No. 1 is an interactive piece that explores the translation of sound into light. In this work I'm interested in the ability of one medium to function poetically when represented within another, specifically how experience is communicated through undulating folds of space-time and coalesces in the creation of relationships between the group and the individual.

Philip Stearns

SASHA WATERS FREYER, Iowa City, IA
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape, 2012
16mm transferred to HD

Longing leaks from my films—as in the physical and psychic upheavals of time and memory. Our Summer Made Her Light Escape extends this exploration into the beautiful, quotidian cruelties of maternity, the natural world and our human-invented marking of time.

I am committed to a cinema of opposition to the industrial mass media; to disrupting status quo representations of conventional power relations and to the re-imagining of social histories in the spirit of engagement with an earlier age of radical-romantic image-making. Heretical and often anachronistic, my work draws inspiration from sources as varied as philosopher Gaston Bachelard, artist Jean Dubuffet, writers Mary Gaitskill and Haruki Murakami, photographer Helen Levitt and many, many poets.

Sasha Waters Freyer

FORCEPERUNIT: JACQUELINE WEAVER +TIMOTHY MCMURRAY, Troy, NY
A Measurable Substance, 2012
Light projection on graph paper

Light is a marker of time and space. Its presence and absence mark days and millennia and chart our place in the universe. While the empirical study of light is filled with equations and data that define our history, our daily interactions with light are intuitive, sensory experiences—sometimes taken for granted, other times held in the highest regard for its symbolic presence. It is this duality between the measurable substance and the incalculable experience that this piece addresses.

In this piece, a band of projected light moves methodically across a long, single row of graph paper attached to the wall, spanning the length of the wall. The graph paper, as a projection surface, measures the predictable, continuous movement of the light. Because the paper is only secured to the wall along one edge, airflow periodically passes behind the paper, lifting it away from the wall to reveal a shadow beneath the paper, the shadow itself proof of the light's existence. The movement is fluid yet spontaneous, obvious and subtle, present then absent, contrasting the constant predictability of the light's movement across the paper.

Forceperunit