Light is the medium: it all starts from there.
Can we control light?
Can we mould it as we please?
Is light the beginning of all arts?
Over time, I kept exploring the concept of making in photography as opposed to taking a photograph.
For this exhibition I wanted to focus on light as a way to change the appearance and the structure of a surface. It is an exploration of how artists channel and employ light to take their desired shape and serve their needs in their art practice.
Artists exhibiting:
Almudena Romero
Marguerite Thomas
Melanie King
David Pereira
Chloe Obermeyer
Mariette Kotzé
Bronni Cross
Evy Cohen
René Shaffer
In its purest form, photography is a combination of few basic ingredients: light and a mean to record it.
The artists exhibited show a tendency to deconstruct their photographic practice and break down photography’s essentials, exploring pre-digital photographic processes with a fresh enthusiasm for experimentation.
Shaping light is an exhibition that challenges the two- dimensional nature of the photographic image.
It is the manifestation of an extra layer in photography that has a breakable nature, it is textured and has an unexpected consistency.
Shaping light means simplifying, conceiving photography as an experience, an event, a process, and a performance. The outcome is the result of physical actions and physical alteration of a surface.
The artist produces visible and tactile traces. The photographic material is rough, scratchy and dusty, no longer flat, pristine and spotless.
The artist does not necessarily aspire to perfection but rather celebrates the unexpected and the unknown. We identify photography as an ever changing medium based on constant experimentation.
The photographer investigates the relationship between the presence of the image on a surface and its decay and fragmentation due to external agents. Artists take advantage of bacteria, chemicals and the complexity of light itself to investigate reactions and explore the concept of disappearance and precariousness in photography.
The image is often distorted and reinvented, light is the agent that defines the duality between destruction and creation, transience and permanence.
Location: Studio BONG Gallery.