Title: Phillip K Smith III: Light + Shadows Works
Posted In: Exhibition
Artist: Phillip K. Smith III
Duration: 21 November 2015 to 23 January 2016
Venue: Royale Projects DTLA (entrance on Seaton St btwn 4th & 5th St)
Opening Hours: Thursday to Saturday 12-5pm
Location: 432 Alameda Street Los Angeles , CA 90013 United States
Telephone: +1 (213) 595-5182
Email: [email protected]
Capturing the perceptual corporeality of light and shadow may be acknowledged as a tall order but that’s exactly what American artist Phillip K. Smith III
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber. Eschewing more intricate techniques such as the LED colour-changing lighting he used in his previous work —as seen for example in Lucid Stead (2013), a “see-through” mirror-clad cabin installed in the middle of Joshua Tree desert in California- Smith III now employs an even more minimalist approach. He creates carbon-fibre 3D forms, paints them matte white, and lights them by one or more stationary light-sources. In this way, the artist attempts to present “light in its most reduced state” and allow “the brain to exist in blurred states”: as the visitor changes his or her point of view, light and shadow encroach upon one another while the forms that they see change shape between a two- and a three-dimensional state, as if they expanding and contracting, unfolding and retracting.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber. The larger of these forms is a composition of 2.4-meter-wide hovering disks named “Complex Surface: Discs 1-3” exhibited at the gallery’s front salon, where the disks appear as curvaceous, bent surfaces when viewed from the side. Other rectangular or elongated shapes can be found in the other rooms, all creating illusions that appear to be both convex and concave surfaces depending from which angle you look at them, together with ten smaller versions of the aforementioned “Complex Surface” discs from the “Faceted Discs” series —itself an ongoing project of 100 unique pieces which the artist has pledged to create over a decade, at a rate of ten per year.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber. These glowing sculptures, the only source of illumination in the gallery, create an almost mystical ambience, as they transform the space into a shrine of light and shadow, a sacred space of perceptual contemplation, which is exactly what the visitors are invited to do as they move around the exhibits taking in their ever-shifting forms.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber. Video of Phillip K. Smith III : Light + Shadow Works Video by Lance Gerber .
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
Photo by Lance Gerber.
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