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24/11/2006

Light x Eight

The Jewish Museum, New York

To celebrate Hanukkah this year, The Jewish Museum will present Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project from November 25, 2006 through February 4, 2007.

This exhibition explores the transformative properties of light in the works of eight contemporary artists. Each artist employs light or refers to the properties of light as a means to alter common, everyday materials into luminous visual objects. In this exhibition, light is utilized both as material and metaphor to investigate memory, perception, and time. Artists represented include Teresita Ferna'ndez, Spencer Finch, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Sharon Louden, Brigitte Nahon, Alyson Shotz, Mary Temple and Pae White. The works by Sharon Louden and Mary Temple were commissioned by The Jewish Museum.

Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project is The Jewish Museum’s fourth exhibition on this theme (previous exhibitions took place in 1998, 2000 and 2002). Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project can be found on the first floor of the Museum in the Grant Gallery; adjacent to the staircase between the third and fourth floor in the Museum’s permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey; and on the third floor in the elevator lobby and in the Jerome Greene Contemporary Gallery. This year, Hanukkah begins at sundown on Friday, December 15 and continues through sundown on Saturday, December 23.

Nature, represented in Teresita Ferna'ndez’s Vermillion Fragment (2006) by a fiery landscape, is a recurring theme in the artist’s work. Ferna'ndez overlays plexiglass cubes with an abstracted, enlarged image of flame. In juxtaposing the real with the constructed, she creates an artificial experience of encountering a dramatic natural occurrence, ultimately questioning the ways in which the viewer perceives the environment. This juxtaposition is furthered by the formal elements of this sculpture: though the visual effect is organic and atmospheric, the underlying geometry reveals a more architectonic minimalist aesthetic. Vermillion Fragment captures the gallery’s ambient light, reflecting and refracting it to cinematic, kaleidoscopic effect, and heightening the illusion of perceived reality.

In Sunset (South Texas, 6/21/03) (2006), Spencer Finch draws his inspiration from the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, the great nineteenth-century landscape artist who studied nature and used his canvases to explore and depict the atmospheric effects of light. Finch, like Turner, bases his work on actual experiences and re-creates the light conditions of specific sites at particular moments in time. In Sunset, Finch replicates a Texas sunset on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. Florescent tubes encased in colored filters extend across the gallery wall, mimicking a stretch of horizon. Sunset represents Finch’s continued interest in sensory perceptions and memory. Color leads the artist to investigate these experiences. Although Finch’s measurements of light and color are remarkably precise, his work calls attention to the subjectivity of truth and reality.

In Kirsten Hassenfeld’s Offering (2006), strands of jewels, crystals, and medallions materialize into various shapes and configurations. As these emblems of luxury combine with architectural elements from a mix of grand styles, issues of beauty, desire, and privilege are questioned in this elaborate installation. This work is constructed almost entirely from paper. However, the inclusion of actual light emanating from within the piece transforms the appearance of the material. The translucent effect mimics the luminosity of glass and gems. Though Hassenfeld is able to capture the likeness of these materials, her use of paper physically and metaphorically suggests a sense of fragility, undermining the real value normally attributed to these precious objects.

Sharon Louden’s Blue Willow (2006), handcrafted out of paper, filament, and hardware, blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. These pieces are scaled to the human body and react dramatically when exposed to light. In Blue Willow, each sheet of translucent Mylar is also a canvas of unique gestural strokes of iridescent paint. When the timer plunges Blue Willow into complete darkness, both work and space are thoroughly transformed. This abstract composition seems to change over and over again as the light goes on and off, leaving the viewer with ephemeral traces of form.

In TIME ZERO (2006), Brigitte Nahon employs a combination of fragile and strong materials that often seem to float in space. Her ethereal work addresses such opposites as balance and imbalance, solidity and fragility, heaviness and lightness, the temporary and the eternal. Reflecting her connection to her Jewish identity, TIME ZERO was the first work made after Nahon’s recovery from cancer. In the piece, life metaphorically hangs in the balance as wood spokes and crystals cascade toward two reflective stainless steel panels on the floor. Like mirrors, these panels expand the piece almost infinitely while incorporating the viewer’s reflection in the work. In TIME ZERO, light and shadow are the artist’s metaphors for spirituality and rebirth.

In Coalescence (2006), Alyson Shotz threads glass beads onto wire, and sculpts those strands into knotted forms that resemble gestural line drawings in space, creating objects that are at once frenzied and still. Although Coalescence is motionless, the ambient light that passes through and over the surface of the glass makes this work appear to shift in space as the viewer moves around it. With this seemingly floating object (hung from the ceiling by delicate fishing line), the understanding of space, mass, and gravity are challenged. What appears solid and opaque from one angle is suddenly airy and translucent from another. Coalescence makes the viewer aware of the ways in which light can alter not only the appearance of a material, but the sense of stability within a visual field.

Mary Temple’s Corner Light (French Gothic) (2006) explores the condition of standing in a space flooded by sunlight slicing through a window and casting a pattern of brightness and shadow along the wall and the floor. This is a familiar experience encountered in daily life. What is strange and unsettling here is that Temple has re-created this play of light and shadow in a windowless gallery. As one approaches the wall, closer inspection reveals a constructed reality, as brush strokes and thick paint become visible. The visual cues we rely on vis-a'-vis an expected light source are upended here. The realization that this is a re-creation of light and shadow both reveals the terms of perception and makes explicit light’s ability to alter the sensation of being in a space.

Pae White’s oeuvre plays with the ways light, color, and form affect certain materials. Her Tip Top Tapestry no.1 and Tip Top Tapestry no.2 (2006), rendered entirely of matte fabric, fool the eye into believing that light is playing on the contours of a shiny object. These tapestries depict strong light hitting the surfaces of a variety of papers, ranging from highly reflective foil to glossy magazine cutouts to brightly colored construction paper. White takes photographs of the materials and then runs them through a computer digitization process, rendering the lights and darks higher in contrast as the areas of color are juxtaposed with the gray-scale tones of the foil. Each image is then transferred to a loom and a tapestry is woven. The tapestries change depending on one’s distance from them. Up close, the works function much like large abstract or Pointillist paintings, and one simply sees bits of colored thread. It is only as the viewer moves farther back that the images of overlapping and crumpled paper appear. Using a medium that has no reflective properties, White’s tapestries capture the effects of light.

Image: Spencer Finch

The works in Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project were selected by Ali Gass, formerly Neubauer Family Foundation Curatorial Assistant at The Jewish Museum, and Joanna Montoya, Curatorial Program Coordinator. The exhibition has been coordinated by Joanna Montoya.

Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project is supported by the Barbara S. Horowitz Contemporary Art Fund.

About The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum was established on January 20, 1904 when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, The Jewish Museum maintains an important collection of 25,000 objects - paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent United States institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture.

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.
Museum hours are Saturday through Wednesday, 11am to 5:45pm; and Thursday, 11am to 8pm.
Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays.

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