HARD LIGHT
In 2018, in a lab at MIT, an international group of physicists created what has since been named solid light or hard light. Photons that were not previously known to have mass were temporarily bound to one another and for a brief moment,
what was weightless had been brought into being.
September 2020 - April 2021 / Hosted by Elaine Jacob Gallery, WSU Detroit, MI / Broadcast from the artists' studios
Lucy Puls, Turbatus (Solid, Liquid, Body, Mind)
Broadcast on September 17, 2020 from Berkeley, CA
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Turbatus is a Latin verb meaning to disturb, agitate, throw into confusion. Lucy Puls presents an unraveling, a roiling, a displeasure.
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Puls received her M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is represented in numerous collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), the Crocker Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, and the Jewish Museum in New York. Puls is a Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California at Davis. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Margaret Hull, MUA
Broadcast on October 22, 2020 Detroit, MI
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MUA is a group performance and tutorial on how to look more like Brook Shields in the 80's. Margaret Hull is an artist and designer working in textiles, garments, performance, installation, and video who questions the ritual of wearing clothes and its effect on representation and image distribution. Hull has an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Fiber from Maryland Institute of Art. She maintains a studio in Hamtramck, Michigan and is Assistant Professor in the Fashion Design and Merchandising program at Wayne State University.
Richard Haley, Duet (version 2)
Broadcast on November 12, 2020 from Suburban Detroit
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Richard Haley is an artist, curator and writer living in Suburban Detroit. His work is tied to concepts defining self and being; or more specifically, what does one do when they are not sleeping or practicing breathing. His work takes the form of sculpture, video, and photography. It takes elusive ideas, bordering on the metaphysical and transcendental and pushes and perverts them into corporeal terms.
Cody Vanderkaay, Untitled (how are the trails?)
Broadcast on November 5, 2020 from Michigan
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A 60 Minute Drawing- The initial line may start/stop anywhere, move in any direction along a straight path, without making contact with itself, and stay within the boundary of the paper edge.
Cody VanderKaay graduated from Northern Michigan University with a B.F.A. in Sculpture and from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia with an M.F.A. in Sculpture. VanderKaay is an Associate Professor of Art at Oakland University’s Department of Art and Art History.
Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, Patterns of Interference / Troubling Water
Broadcast on November 19, 2020 from Miami, FL
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Patterns of Interference/ Troubling Water is an experiment in cymatics, the study of wave phenomena, sound and its visual representation. The artist disrupts the perception of space using light and liquid as plastic materials that combine to form tiny psychedelic universes.
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Felecia Chizuko Carlisle (Miami, FL) performs atmospheric alchemy with space, light, sound, and with this ephemera, the psyche of a place and time. Many of her works feature two phases, atmospheric intervention in the form of sculptural form and lighting, and community activation
Virginia Lee Montgomery, Ponytale Disco
Broadcast on December 3, 2020 from Austin, TX
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Ponytale Disco is part of a larger body of work recently on view at Hesse Flatow Gallery In NYC. Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator working between Austin, Texas and New York, NY, USA. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Her artwork is a research practice of feminist metaphysics. VLM interrogates the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. VLM also works as a professional scribe, a Graphic Facilitator.
Bailey Scieszka, The Tragic Mirror,
Broadcast on December 17, 2020 from Detroit, MI
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The Tragic Mirror features the shape-shifting alien clown Old Put who is back for another puppet drama where they start their own YouTube channel to unbox corn husk dolls for an audience online. Old Put's sentient video camera captures ghosts and an Old Put doppelgänger. Chaos ensues as the world questions the legitimacy of Spiritualism.
Trisha Holt, Learning to Be Your Own Ghost
Broadcast on January 14, 2021 from Toledo, OH
Trisha Holt is a visual artist interested in the physical properties of the photographic print and the possibilities of its reproduction as a way to address the power of images in contemporary culture. Her images are printed and positioned as life-size, topographical, and site specific installations which are then re-framed in new photographs or experienced as sculptural objects and performances. Images are appropriated and altered, with echoes of commercial photography editorials or Instagram aesthetics. Memory is displaced or contested, and what the lens sees is actually happening - though it appears uncanny.
Chris Reilly, Origin Story
Broadcast on January 21, 2021 from Detroit, MI
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Origin Story combines live action with software-generated imagery and props into a camouflaged self portrait/still life.
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Chris Reilly holds a MFA from UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture. Working individually and collaboratively, his artwork explores communication, relationships, perception, participation, and collaboration using media including sculpture, photography, software, installation, and open-source tech projects.
Kevin Arrow, I Seem To Be a Verb
Broadcast on February 11, 2021 from Miami, FL
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Kevin Arrow is a Miami Beach based multimedia artist whose work is informed by archives, history, fictional narratives, and surprise. He collects orphaned 35mm slides and has amassed over 100,000 images. He uses this collection to make artworks that take the form of 35mm slide presentations, light boxes and self-published ‘zines in addition to developing “hands on” workshops for the general public to learn about 35mm slides and prepared projectors.
Rachel Clarke, Sky Map
Broadcast on March 25, 2021 from Sacramento, CA
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The limitless geography of virtual space is the starting point for this journey through remixed landscapes of words, memories, and events. Detached from the corporeal, from physical terrain, gravity and the body, this space can be understood as a mind map, where the senses, awareness, thought and experience can exist in a boundless state.
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Rachel Clarke’s works intertwine themes of nature, culture and technology, combining media such as drawing, experimental animation, augmented and virtual reality.
Tom Burtonwood, Schrödinger's cat isn't dead after all
Broadcast on March 25, 2021 from Chicago, IL
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Schrödinger's cat isn't dead after all is a tongue in cheek project to explore states of possible simultaneity. A cardboard box may or may not contain a cat. Using an internet enabled device one might look inside the box and observe whether or not a cat is present. Tom Burtonwood (b. United Kingdom) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator and Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through sculpture, drawing and video Burtonwood explores how vision is structured and constructed.
Elisabeth Condon, A Painting Has To Breathe
Broadcast on March 11, 2021 from Florida
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Elisabeth Condon is known for landscapes that overlay a synesthetic sense of place with references to scrolls, vintage patterns, and color field abstraction. For Hard Light, she created a live painting, combining pre-recorded and physical elements. Using light shadow and pattern, she improvised a composition from diverse and random elements, seeking new structures for navigating physical and digital worlds. Her work has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, and Pollock Krasner Foundation.
Catherine Hollingsworth, Invocation for Home
Broadcast on April 8, 2021 from Charlotte, NC
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Invocation for Home is a framed and technologically mediated meditation on place. Do we belong to a place (or in a place) or do we just adapt to our surroundings? How do we orient ourselves in the physical world when we are confined indoors and separated from each other? How do we make and share ideas? This work responds to the current migration of people to new places due to COVID, climate threats, and attempts to find a better more sustaining life, as well as the questions about bodies, places and technology posed by the HARD LIGHT performance series. Performed in collaboration with 13-year old cameraman Charlie Stubbs.
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