|
||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
Photos at Light & Sie feature intricate detail
17 October 2007
17 October 2007
Light & Sie Gallery, in the Dallas Design District, came together in a flash, according to co-owner Andrew Sie, who opened the 13,500-square-foot venue with partner Stanley Light on Sept. 27. And it's debuted with a bang, featuring an exhibition by the British photography team of Anderson and Low.
"We began discussing the gallery in August of '06. We got financial backing last November. We had been looking for rental property on Dragon Street and not really finding anything, but then we found this in March," Mr. Sie said. They decided to buy the facility on Leslie, a street that runs just west off Industrial Boulevard.
Entering the gallery along what used to be a loading ramp, you walk into a 6,000-square-foot space interrupted only by the occasional support column. Floors, walls, ceiling and exposed ductwork have all been painted white. Behind this is another exhibition space with 2,000 square feet. Viewing rooms, offices and a library make up the rest of the currently usable space, but next door is an additional 10,000 square feet that when finished out will be available for storage and expansion.
Mr. Sie says they want to show new media and the kind of cutting-edge contemporary art known for gobbling up enormous amounts of floor space.
Thus, Light & Sie's appetite for Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low, who've been exhibiting photography worldwide since the early 1990s. They began with black-and-white, highly formalized images of athletes and soldiers. A move to architectural studies was not too far a step, since their figures were more about form than character. Then they zeroed in so closely on details of architecture that the photos became abstractions.
At Light & Sie, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Low are premiering a new body of work called "Chrysalis," 48-by-48-inch color abstractions created by computer manipulation of architectural details. Close examination of minute components of these images sometimes reveals their architectural origins, and a few works with larger components are clearly colorized versions of something as common as the corner of an empty room.
More often, however, the dazzling patterns the pair and their support team have created devour whatever real-world elements have gone into their making. We're left with technical marvels that can be dizzying or relaxing, inviting or threatening – effects that depend as much upon the viewer's frame of mind as on the images themselves.
The artists are at their best when they play with images in which the illusion of regularity gives way to a random pattern of similar components presented in an endlessly varied progression.
Parade has been divided into four equal horizontal bands filled with shaded areas of red, blue and beige. Diagonal lines cut through each band, but no lines ever quite meet, and whatever repeating patterns perceived at first dissolve upon closer inspection. In A City for Paul, a cluster of small polygons forms what looks somewhat like a rectangular braided rug balanced on one corner. It floats against a dark background. The color range and compactness of the central figure clue you in to the fact that the Paul of the title is Paul Klee, and this could be one of his fanciful cities, seen from the window of an airplane or possibly floating in deep space. As with Parade, the illusion of order gives way to randomness.
The reference to Klee is subtle and well-handled, but the range of references the artists claim for much of the work remains submerged in the sheer technical accomplishment of the final product. We Are Ku places shell-like spirals against a Magritte-blue sky. The Magritte reference is likely to register with most art-savvy viewers, and you can read in the catalog that ku is an imaginary fruit described in The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, an experimental novel by Milorad Pavic popular in the 1980s. Unfortunately, none of this prevents We Are Ku from looking like a screen saver.
But even the best work in the show has to compete with the installation. Admittedly this is the initial outing, but the gallery has not mastered the enormous long walls. Filling them with evenly spaced, identically sized images is both dull and visually fatiguing. To find the smaller gallery filled with more of the same is overkill.
The next exhibition includes works in a variety of media, including large-scale sculpture, that may better demonstrate what Light & Sie can do.
"We began discussing the gallery in August of '06. We got financial backing last November. We had been looking for rental property on Dragon Street and not really finding anything, but then we found this in March," Mr. Sie said. They decided to buy the facility on Leslie, a street that runs just west off Industrial Boulevard.
Entering the gallery along what used to be a loading ramp, you walk into a 6,000-square-foot space interrupted only by the occasional support column. Floors, walls, ceiling and exposed ductwork have all been painted white. Behind this is another exhibition space with 2,000 square feet. Viewing rooms, offices and a library make up the rest of the currently usable space, but next door is an additional 10,000 square feet that when finished out will be available for storage and expansion.
Mr. Sie says they want to show new media and the kind of cutting-edge contemporary art known for gobbling up enormous amounts of floor space.
Thus, Light & Sie's appetite for Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low, who've been exhibiting photography worldwide since the early 1990s. They began with black-and-white, highly formalized images of athletes and soldiers. A move to architectural studies was not too far a step, since their figures were more about form than character. Then they zeroed in so closely on details of architecture that the photos became abstractions.
At Light & Sie, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Low are premiering a new body of work called "Chrysalis," 48-by-48-inch color abstractions created by computer manipulation of architectural details. Close examination of minute components of these images sometimes reveals their architectural origins, and a few works with larger components are clearly colorized versions of something as common as the corner of an empty room.
More often, however, the dazzling patterns the pair and their support team have created devour whatever real-world elements have gone into their making. We're left with technical marvels that can be dizzying or relaxing, inviting or threatening – effects that depend as much upon the viewer's frame of mind as on the images themselves.
The artists are at their best when they play with images in which the illusion of regularity gives way to a random pattern of similar components presented in an endlessly varied progression.
Parade has been divided into four equal horizontal bands filled with shaded areas of red, blue and beige. Diagonal lines cut through each band, but no lines ever quite meet, and whatever repeating patterns perceived at first dissolve upon closer inspection. In A City for Paul, a cluster of small polygons forms what looks somewhat like a rectangular braided rug balanced on one corner. It floats against a dark background. The color range and compactness of the central figure clue you in to the fact that the Paul of the title is Paul Klee, and this could be one of his fanciful cities, seen from the window of an airplane or possibly floating in deep space. As with Parade, the illusion of order gives way to randomness.
The reference to Klee is subtle and well-handled, but the range of references the artists claim for much of the work remains submerged in the sheer technical accomplishment of the final product. We Are Ku places shell-like spirals against a Magritte-blue sky. The Magritte reference is likely to register with most art-savvy viewers, and you can read in the catalog that ku is an imaginary fruit described in The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, an experimental novel by Milorad Pavic popular in the 1980s. Unfortunately, none of this prevents We Are Ku from looking like a screen saver.
But even the best work in the show has to compete with the installation. Admittedly this is the initial outing, but the gallery has not mastered the enormous long walls. Filling them with evenly spaced, identically sized images is both dull and visually fatiguing. To find the smaller gallery filled with more of the same is overkill.
The next exhibition includes works in a variety of media, including large-scale sculpture, that may better demonstrate what Light & Sie can do.
