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Justas Pipinis, Laine Stewart, Josh Wilson, Nina Wright

In November we will track the light that comes through our gallery window.

Opening Event :

Thursday 12 November, 6 - 9pm

Continues :

12 November - 28 November

Thursdays 6pm - 8pm

Saturdays 10am - 4pm

When morning light glances on the left wall, slides down and dances across the floor by midday before climbing up in the evening to exit on the right, that’s Earth spinning. In November, the path of light inches closer to the window day by day, pushed by Earth’s tilted orbit around the Sun. The north-facing window and surrounding buildings impose their own limits on the visitation, while the weather decides how focused or diffused it will be. The whole Universe, from the planetary to the human to the subatomic, comes together to draw moving shapes in the gallery.

Trying to pin them down is a rather silly, tautological effort. And yet, humanity has always been obsessed with capture and replication, even if its rationale kept shifting. Plato believed physical reality to be an imperfect shadow of the ideal forms, making art an imitation of an imitation, twice removed from truth and therefore good for nothing. Aristotle, by contrast, saw it as an active selection channelling empathy and catharsis. While 19th-century Realist painters strove to depict social conditions and natural light as accurately as possible, later theorists like Jacques Derrida questioned whether an original reality underpinning our representations exists at all.

A strange tension prevails between the falsity of depiction, which is never the thing it aims to represent, and the truthfulness of its material existence. As we scramble to capture a moment, to grasp and recreate the world as we know it, we inevitably change it. For better, for worse? Who knows. Yet here we go again, tracking the light, hoping for enlightenment.

Text by Justas Pipinis