ALEXANDRA DEMENTIEVA, ANNA FRANTS, RAPHAELE SHIRLEY
| The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery is pleased to present the group show, Time Is Light, on display at the SWPK Gallery from March 6th to May 18th, 2024. The exhibition features installations from three female media artists, Alexandra Dementieva, Anna Frants, and Raphaele Shirley. An opening reception with the artists will take place at 6:00pm on March 6th. Time Is Light offers an exploration of the kinetic relationship between its two titular elements, featuring installations by three distinguished multimedia artists. In its usage of colors, luminosity, interactions, reflections, and movements of light, this installation opens a conceptual portal, evoking transient yet poignant moments. The works of these artists endeavor to celebrate the innate ability embedded in light for storytelling, communication, and affecting emotional change. Before scientists sought to systematize its behavior, and certainly before its existence was understood as an unsolvable problem in the world of quantum physics, light had already been heavily examined throughout history, as its natural mysticism allowed it a central role in many global mythological systems. Though contemporary society has all but disregarded a theology hinged upon deities of light reigning over the Earth, there remain lingering traces of this transcendence. This spectacular nature of light is central to the installations in Time Is Light. In these works, light is at once a medium through which time is reflected and the means through which emotional and political change is allowed to occur. |
| Alexandra Dementieva‘s Breathless imagines light as a function of time in the present moment, mapping online linguistic trends in real time. By allowing the glow of installation’s lights to be altered when a participant breathes into an attached sensor, Dementieva emphasizes the malleability of the political landscape, as well as the agency of the human subject within it. |
| Anna Frants‘ contributions from her series Simple Pleasures trace the moving image historically. These “stories of light” provide contemporary reanimations of one of humanity’s oldest aspirations: capturing movement, and thus time, in light. Through moving images, Frants evokes a tradition which has evolved over millennia from the age of cave paintings and shadow puppets to the modern era of film, camera, and digital animation. |
| 3 Tone Ephemeral, a sculpture in light by Raphaele Shirley, celebrates the vibrancy of time as experienced through the present moment. Light here intonates emotion and underlines duration through its sequential appearance of alternating wavelengths. Integrated into the piece is sound composition by minimalist composer Rhys Chatham. His sounds interplay with the color fields in an open-ended sequence. |
| ABOUT THE ARTISTS Alexandra Dementieva is a multidisciplinary artist born in Moscow and based in Brussels whose work incorporates sculpture, dance, music, cinema, and performance. Her installations demonstrate an interest in both technology and human psychology. Anna Frants is an internationally acclaimed new media artist, curator, and art writer born in Leningrad, USSR and currently residing in Miami. She is a co-founder of the CYLAND Media Art Lab and the CYLAND Foundation, and is a leading voice in cultural dialogue surrounding experimental art. Born in Wisconsin and based in New York, Raphaele Shirley is an internationally recognized multi-media artist. Her oeuvre is an amalgam of sculpture, light, public art, and performance which sits at the intersection of art and technology. Through her work she explores the topics of physics, civilization through time, and finitude of existence. |