MEDIA

LIGHT, has preoccupied artists throughout the history of art. Light in its natural or manufactured form is both medium and subject for these seven local and international artists who use photography, print-media and sculpture to explore and harness this volatile medium

The ultimate and natural light source, the Sun, is the basis for CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW's sun cluster images and form of photo-drawing. Working from his London rooftop with a simple pin-hole camera, each cell of light he captures is a photographic image of the Sun's disc. The solar specks shimmer and resonate, encapsulated in their grounds of rose, blue and indigo and range in colour from blazing white to fiery magenta, depending on the length of exposure and time of day.

'Light' and 'photo' are interchangeable in many tongues. SIMONE DOUGLAS probes the cryptic visual language of light in the enigmatic Blind series of photographs. This artist is preoccupied with the question 'What is light?'. She says of her work : 'The images are the question - the answer lies in the flight of the eye'.

Light, depending on its intensity, has the potential to heighten the senses and to transform our perceptions. Collaborative photographers AZIZ+CUCHER take advantage of video technology, with light as its vehicle, to conflate sculpture, photography and the digital process for an ecstatic vision of reality. The simultaneous exposure to multiple scales and perspectives, created with intricately layered patterns, shimmering texture and exuberant colour, blurs and distorts our awareness inducing what Aziz+Cucher call 'synaptic bliss'.

The light boxes of ELISA SIGHICELLI are intentionally only partially lit. Each photograph may originally record her encounter with a given Arctic landscape or domestic interior, but emphasis on the play of light and dark by selectively painting out areas of the image, serve to manipulate perceptions and visually and psychologically intensify the ambivalence of mood and subject.

SHANE FITZGERALD's ethereal and dramatic works resemble light boxes. They are thick with atmosphere and energy. Intense colour saturations are drenched with the light, heat and humidity of the forces of nature. Yet his romantic light-scapes are ideas of landscapes, not actual panoramas. These are not computer generated. Fitzgerald adheres to the traditions of fine art photography. Using a 35mm camera he shoots into collections of coloured lamps, humidified to produce mists and fogs. Assorted filters and lenses, and exposure times that can range from two seconds to twenty minutes, capture a unique moment. These are fictive landscapes literally painted with light.

REBECCA BEARDMORE 's work is situated on the boundaries of perception. Print-media is taken beyond traditional practice in the architectonic, yet ephemeral installation, 'Borrowed Scenery'. The light-reflective qualities of five suspended, semi-translucent sand-blasted and silk-screened acrylic panels are exploited and harnessed. These simultaneously refract, reflect and fragment the natural world outside, and the interplay of space, people and objects inside. A commentary, faintly screened onto the panels and beginning A storm had blown in suddenly the evening before. Further extends the view to include that of an imagined spectator.

The light of the natural world is shunned in BRYDEE ROOD's aggressively 'un-natural' sculptures. The materials, PVC pipes salvaged from an Auckland construction site, are man-made and are the stuff of waste and infrastructure. When lit by manufactured neon gas in acid hues, the phosphorescent glow of pools of light emitted from the voids in these plastic utilitarian objects, transforms them into a constellation that is at once alien and ethereal.