And Then There is Light
25, Feb 2017 to 31, Mar 2017
Curated by Monica Jain in collaboration with Design Matrix
Ethereal and intangible, it travels through space
Dancing upon surfaces, revealing forms, exposing materials
Penetrating thoughts & creating stunning spaces in its wake.
There’s something mesmerizing, magical about light. Coming from ‘light years’ away it makes forms visible; visuals appear due to the action of light not just in seeing but also in its very act of creating. Transient and intangible, light is both the subject matter and the ‘material’ revealed through this show. It encourages the viewer to see light as a phenomenological experience while it acts upon the tangible surface thereby closing the distance we perceive as existing between space and surface. Or is it that the ‘surface’ or ‘form’ only appears due to its action? Here we treat light as a temporal, subjective experience far removed from sheer ‘object-hood’ or materiality.
As a curator, it is a subject of endless exploration for me, with this show being the first in its concretisation of expression and thought. It started with a deep fascination with the concept of the Schrödinger’s Cat phenomenon as discussed in quantum physics, which remains somewhat elusive to both scientific and metaphysical understanding till date. On a more earthly note, as James Turell, the doyen of light as art said,``There's a sweet deliciousness to seeing yourself see something”. In that sense, we are both the observer and the observed and if we were to look at it as part of popular culture, then certainly the selfie culture epitomizes it.