Shadows = Light: New Work

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Barbara Kasten, Shadow = Light: New Works. In her latest exhibition, Kasten traces back to a familiar theme that has faithfully informed her practice since the 1970s: the interplay between light, space, and the physical form. Manifested in a return to the Studio Construct series that Kasten began in the early 1980s, these recent works continue the artist’s preoccupation with visual representation that is at once about the physical elements, which create an image as it is about the intangibility of the image being captured. The exhibition will feature five large scale works from Kasten’s recent Studio Constructs series, as well as a video, Shadow=Light, 2010, displayed in resonance with these pieces.

Kasten’s work is an attempt to release the photograph from normative constraints of representation. Each work begins by the fabrication of sculptures that becomes each photograph’s setting. Rendered in multiple arrays of geometries and tangents, the structural element of Kasten’s Constructs are vivified by varying qualities of light that serve to create the complimentary shadows –a direct foil to light- of the lit sculptural objects. By using permeable materials like glass and steel mesh -and at times purposefully abrading its surface with delicate scratchings and marks- these works also detail the artist’s hand at manipulating the discourse of light as it glides through these invisible planes, leaving its tracery in the form of an opposite dark. Shadow and light, in balanced relationship, becomes the visible yet numinous photographic subjects captured by the camera. The concept that one cannot reside without the other enables these works to present another perspective of a fundamental synthesis residing in nature.

The artist will also present a video work expanding upon the ideals of the Studio Construct works, Shadow=Light, 2010. Following the same animus which drove Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the merging of art and technology, Kasten expands her investigation into contemporary means of referencing photography through digital forms of representation. This short digital video itself changes the fundamental photographic elements of shadow and light into an electronic signal – sequential bits of electronic information serving to form a filmic plane. This choice of process emphasizes the otherwise elusiveness of the image’s subject, and introduces another variable to Kasten’s practice –time’s duration.