Impressive light sculptures at festival

Drawing with Light, Anthony McCall
Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University
Until April 25th

Vessels, Daniel K Brown
Museum of Wellington City and Sea
Until March 21st

Two of the exhibitions at the NZ International Festival have light as a major aspect of the work. Daniel K Brown’s show at the Museum of Wellington City and Sea uses light as a way of creating a sense of history and myth while Anthony McCall’s exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery uses light as a cross between drawing and sculpture.

The veteran English artist, Anthony McCall produced a number of works in the 1970s but only began to work in new media over the last five years. His exhibition consists of work from the early 1970’s as well as some of his “solid light films” produced over last few years.

Some of his works in the 1970’s were environmental art pieces where the artist created spaces or intervened in the landscape. These interventions were recorded on film and in some cases where he used fire to create spaces one can see the beginnings of his interest in creating figures and shapes in space using light.

In the recent works he uses projected light to trace lines and shapes, creating images which are a combination of abstract film making, line drawings, and three-dimensional sculptures.

The lines continually change as though being drawn by an invisible hand and in the dark rooms with a mist from smoke machines they create the illusion of various three-dimensional shapes which morph from one into another and there is a sense of being in a hologram.

At one level they seem to be simple exercises in light and time but after a while they begin to change the way we see and respond to the spaces.

The artist takes on the role of alchemist as he begins to change the nature of space and our concepts of form. His works connect with other artist from the latter part of last century such as the neon works of Dan Flavin and the string works of Fred Sandback which were shown at the Jensen Gallery last year.

McCall says of his solid light films that they exist “only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form”.

Dante’s grand poem The Divine Comedy seems to be an unlikely source of a story about New Zealand but in his fourteenth century epic poem he tells of an island in the great Southern ocean. Above the island is a constellation of four stars in the shape of a cross and the original Garden of Paradise.

This is the island that the dead are constantly ferried to. It all sounds like a metaphor for New Zealand.

Kevin K Brown has created the installation “Vessels” which is based on Dante’s Il Puragtorio and is one of the major commissioned works for the festival.

The work which uses a soundscape by Mark K Johnson is located in the stairwell of the Museum of Wellington City and Sea.

The work consists of 33 glass bowls ranged on seven glass shelves. The vessels are intended to represent the 33 cantos of the Purgatory section of The Divine Comedy with the seven levels refering to the sacred island, which is structured in seven terraces.

The visual animations and music which wash over the 33 vessels are in four sections of about ten minutes each and titled Vessel, Aquilon, Tidings and Innocence. The vessel is a boat and aquiline is a wind.

These four sections could also be interpreted as being the ancient elements of life; Earth, Air, Fire and Water which are also the components of glass.

The abstract projected images range from watery passages with flowing water and rain through to dramatic images which look like brain scans and solar flares. Each provides a background to the Dante narrative which can be read in shortened form in the accompanying programme booklet but the best way is to let the images and sound wash over you.

The impressionist style music which is reminiscent of Debussy flows along in a contemplative manner occasionally flecked with dramatic passages.

While the four sections play at forty minute intervals throughout the day, they are only played in a continuous run from 5.00pm