Curated by Dr Emily Cormack
This playful exhibition explores the materiality and poetry of light, experimenting with light’s metaphorical and symbolic qualities, as well as its material and physical properties. Exploring light’s ability to elucidate and enlighten, make visible and splinter into a colour spectrum, the exhibition conjures poetic, generative and structural aspects of light, bridging the worlds of poetry and physics and informing how we perceive and exist in the world.
Light Weight features a rich selection of paintings and photography from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, alongside a major site-responsive installation commission by Naarm-based artist Natasha Johns-Messenger and works on loan from leading Australian contemporary artists. Clarice Beckett’s atmospheric tonalism appears alongside the intense chiaroscuro of Rick Amor and Louise Hearman; Godfrey Miller, Len Lye and John Passmore explode light into fractal arrays; the abstraction of the 1970s and 1980s finds meaning in the material forms of Robert Hunter. Jeremy Eaton’s photosensitive dyes capture light directly onto canvas, while Len Lye’s hand-dyed scratch films are shown with Danica Chappell’s camera-less photography. The exhibition questions the apparent weightlessness of light. Rather, it is immaterial yet omnipresent, heavy with the load it carries.
Featured artists: Rick Amor, Clarice Beckett, Arthur Boyd, Lynne Boyd, Andrew Browne, Jon Cattapan, Danica Chappell, Ray Crooke, Russell Drysdale, Jeremy Eaton, Dale Frank, Mark Galea, Rosalie Gascoigne, Louise Hearman, Robert Hunter, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Len Lye, Taree Mackenzie, Tim Maguire, Ross Manning, Godfrey Miller, Callum Morton, John Olsen, John Passmore, Lloyd Rees, Tim Storrier, Albert Tucker, Brett Whiteley, Fred Williams, Philip Wolfhagen.
Image: John Olsen, Sun Over the You Beaut Country 2014. TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC 2017, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
