Duality of Light

So my first assignment at uni for professional practice is to write an easy 700 word exhibition review. i chose to do mine in the form of a blog so here it is.

Duality of Light is the collective name of an exhibition by Lynette Wallworth which is being shown at the Samstag Museum of Art.
The exhibition contaions various works by Lynette, who has a strong background in photography and eventually evolved into moving images and these elements are the basis of Duality of Light.
When first walking into the large space, at the far end are 3 screens which is the work Damound Mountains. Lynette has used moving images that go at a really slow pace, the mountain stays still but the cloud cover on each screen alters the picture in a different way. Further on a woman in some sort of sheet is in the image and as the wind blows the sheet the image is once again altered by the conditions of the weather. I'm not sure exactly what the artist was trying to portray but what i got out of it was a message about sometimes things are out of our control but even so there is a beauty found in that. I also thought the images where quite sophisticated in a technical way.
The same can be said for Beautiful Sunset, which is a beautiful image of a bunch of trees. At first it appears to just be a single photo, but as you sit and watch you notice the colours and shadows change. The whole thing goes for 40 minutes and shows the changes and effects sunset has on the environment. The colours are striking and as you watch you are absorbed into her work.

The main work of the exhibition is Duality of Light. Where one person at a time enters a dark corridor. As you walk down the corridor an image of yourself is projected at the end. It's quite a strange thing to watch yourself walking towards yourself, i didn't know where to look, which showed up on the image. The whole thing is quite confronting, then you unexpectedly explode into an arragements of flying lines of white and grey.

Upstairs another of Lynettes' work is Hold Vessel 2 was one I really liked. You are asked to take a glass bowl into a dark room where projectors point down from the roof. You hold the bowl under the projector light and watch snippets of different moving images. Things like stars and galaxies, then it changes to microscope images of bugs and things wriggling around. There were also sea scapes, fishes and seals swimming around. The concept reminded me of the video tape in the movie "The Ring". I liked this work but it also made me feel uncomfortable. The combination of the dark room, the creepy images and the background music made for a confronting work.

The final work I viewed in the exhibition was titled Invisible by Night. This was by far the strangest and creepiest art I have ever seen. It's the kind of thing that is so far from anything you would normally see and it, for me, seemed psychologically damaging. Like a nightmare. It is a full length screen, which appears frosted over. Activated by touch, a lady appears behind the frost and wipes lines across the glass at her eye level revealing only her eyes which look not directly at you, but past you. The other hand rests on the glass at hip level. Her hands then wipe down the screen leaving behind the trace of finger tips, at which point she turns and walks away.
It was freaking weird and creepy but at the same time makes you wonder what is going on, why is she there? Where is she? What is she doing? etc.

All in all I found Duality of Light to be a pretty confronting exhibition, the point behind all the works isn't clear but I think that's part of the experience. It all adds to the feeling of out of control, uncomfortableness, and it really makes you think hard and take what YOU get out of it, and i think that's what good art should do. Experience and grow.


ps Amelia has contact lenses.