CURRENTLY SHOWING : UPCOMING
Front Gallery: DAYS OF THE ECLIPSE | Back Gallery: 50 LIGHT FIXTURES FROM HOME DEPOT
Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot, 2010.
Marie Jager, Past Present Future, 2005.
January 22, 2010 - March 06, 2010
Opening Reception: 22 January 2010, 7 PM
Front Gallery:
DAYS OF THE ECLIPSE
An exhibition of works by Gary Beydler, Kristan Horton, Marie Jager, Euan Macdonald, Will Rogan and Elizabeth Zvonar curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan
Back Gallery:
50 LIGHT FIXTURES FROM HOME DEPOT
Premiere of the new 35mm film by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young
“In the bleak mid-winter frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone” —Christina Rossetti, 1872
Two concurrent exhibitions at Mercer Union pay tribute to the wintry theme of the waning of light. With the winter equinox now passed, the cycle reverses: we are gaining light by the second. An eclipse, like the equinox, is a switch point in time – the exact moment when light and dark meet in full cancellation. An eclipse delineates and portends. It is a momentous occasion yet its after-effect may be bleak: the blindness that comes from the sleep of reason or the obscurity we associate with shadows. Its title borrowed from Alexander Sokurov’s dreary yet dreamy film Days of the Eclipse, the exhibition assembles a topographic map of the state of eclipse, providing a detailed representation of both its cultural and natural attributes.
The eponymous 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot, the latest 35mm film by Christian Giroux and Daniel Young is a looping series of static shots of an idealized “white cube” illuminated by the varying glow of mass produced fixtures. Displayed one by one, the fixtures create a portrait of white light—an expanding taxonomy of hues ranging from purple to yellow. The film is a nod to the artificial production of space and the sinister character of interior design’s industrialization of light atmospheres. Projected at life-size, the image suggests a lived architectural dimension. A stage backdrop frighteningly bleak yet satisfyingly complete as a data set; the incremental differences in an otherwise flat horizon creating a series of events. As each image cycles from illumination to blackout, we witness the endless forwards-backwards pull that is the very condition of eclipse.