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SHOW TITLE: White Light/Black Light
ARTISTS: Finnbogi Petursson, Jan Tichy
CURATOR: Murray Horne

Mesmerizing, contemplative, hypnotic and dramatic in its beauty is one way to describe the Icelandic landscape.

It is not coincidental then that these descriptors also apply to the sound-modulated light works by Finnbogi Petursson in the exhibition “White Light-Black Light”. As the artist has stated, “I am always trying to capture phenomena such as sound, water, fire, shadow and light and channel them along new grooves, turn them into something other than what they are. These are phenomena that you feel and think about, but never see.”

Jan Tichy’s multimedia installations also draw upon the ephemeral. The Czech-Israeli artist, now living in Chicago, refers to natural phenomena presented within a digital photographic domain. In Tichy’s “Tubes” (2006), a TV monitor ‘plays’ the white noise of itself while projecting onto a landscape of tubes within a closed environment, yielding an installation that is at once transitory and concrete. With shadow and light assuming equal roles, this sensory environment is hauntingly beautiful and ominous in its measured play.

Photo by Joey Kennedy