It is often that by concealing we reveal. These three photographers exploit light or its absence to create illusion - or collusion, in time and space.  All three are engaged by the dynamics of vision.

‘Ordinary’ sites are scrutinized. While intense light reveals an image, darkness is the keeper of secrets and can transform the reality. All these works are rid of any personal context and permeated with a feeling of absence that generates an ‘atmosphere’ but ironically gives them narrative potential.

In Contemporary practice we are seeking art in which artists have taken their expertise in traditional genres and techniques in a new and innovative direction - while still maintaining technical rigor and challenging us visually and emotionally. These 3 photographers, DD, ES and JW do that.

As there is no wrong without right, there is no light without dark.  And this year’s exhibition Light 08 is as much about dark or shade. Chiaroscuro is a term applied in art to – the effect produced by the use of light and shade.  Light 08 is about obscuring and manipulating to make something unclear, indistinct or hidden, be it light blacked out or blurred, vision skewed or concealed with collage to heighten our visual and emotional perception.

The hypnotic poetic light boxes of Elisa Sighicelli hover between illusion and reality. They are intentionally only partially lit.  Each photograph may originally record her encounter with a given site but her demarcation of the incandescence of areas of light and the subtle sensuous nuances of velvety darkness serve to manipulate our perceptions of the image and to visually and psychologically intensify the ambivalence of mood and subject. Sighicelli enhances this by selectively masking out portions of the photograph’s reverse with black paint before it is placed on its light box support.

Regardless of subject matter, whether it is landscape or an isolated interior, Sighicelli’s constant subject is light.  It is also the principal tool of her editing technique. Very often the artificial light inserted by the artist amplifies a light source already existing within the scene captured by the camera.

Concern with atmosphere and physical space is another constant in Sighicelli’s work.  The backlit advertising billboards of Shanghai is the source image for Sighicelli’s work “Untitled (White)” in this exhibition.  By selectively masking areas of the image, by this obscuring of light, the billboard is deprived of its message and its usefulness. It is ambiguously and perversely ‘promoting’ light.  Sighicelli exploits the subtle interplay between light and dark to transform manufactured light into an ephemeral aura around the latticed scaffolding of the billboard, capturing the imposing scale of the billboard structure, yet at the same time creating a delicacy and fragility with the juxtaposition of areas of dark against light.

Jason Wee challenges the veracity of our natural vision which is binocular and subject to compensatory errors when focusing on a single view; particularly landscapes where perception can be skewed or conditioned by the romantic, turbulent nature of the subject. With a seascape as his subject Jason Wee recreates and exploits these ‘errors’ of vision which he feels ultimately enhance the view.

‘Oscillation’ is a series of six sequential views of a ship crossing a horizon which are recreated through a process of computer-generated intentional errors. These works mine science in the service of art.

Mimicking the antiquated stereoscope, two views of a distant horizon were made by Wee, one slightly angled from the other:

 “I asked the computer to repeatedly correct one side based on the other, akin to asking the computer to recreate the stereoscopic 3-D illusion on a 2-D surface.  In other words, to see exactly as our eyes do, natural stereoscopes that they are. Because this is technologically impossible, errors appear, errors which I think are beautiful, and I subsequently exacerbate.”

Damian Dillon also explores relationships between illusion and reality.  He does this by conflating images, controlling light, manipulating the processing and elsewhere by application of added collage elements stuck directly on to the surfaces. He is part of the current trend in contemporary photography which is about capturing an emotional or psychological effect and not being hung up on technical perfection as much as what work means.  

He chooses subjects which are bleak and unsympathetic, seeking out the mystery of shadow play in urban car parks at night and stark depopulated suburban construction sites. There is a pervading sense of emptiness and malaise, even menace. This sense of alienation is added to by the hard surfaces of industrial metal to which the printed images are fixed.

Detail can be difficult to discern in the darkened environments of the car park, provoking a closer examination of what is literally crossed out or occluded.
These images are often shot from an oblique angle and their surfaces are intentionally marked and manipulated, with detail difficult o discern, further conjuring sinister connotations of surveillance and voyeurism. 

It is said of photography that it is the easiest of media in which to be competent - but the hardest in which to have a personal vision.