Seeing Nothing, 2024
Alex Lark
Seeing Nothing, 2024
colour video projection, acrylic and steel
bench: oak, foam, microfibre leather
dimensions variable
The suspended acrylic panels reflect light from the internal perspective and block certain colour frequencies from other perspectives, rendering the pulsing circle invisible.
View of half the projected colour in direct vision and the other half affected by the suspended acrylic panel. The circular pulse is invisible to the eye when viewed through the material.
The circular shape pulses at a constant rate of 52 bpm, the artist’s resting heartrate averaged across the past year.
Alex Lark
Seeing Nothing, 2024
colour video projection, acrylic and steel
bench: oak, foam, microfibre leather
dimensions variable
About the work
When your perception of reality is altered, even the slightest flicker can create a lasting fissure in immovable preconceptions. These cracks allow new subjective possibilities to permeate through a more receptive consciousness; in this instance, doubt creates a magical moment.
Doubt allows our insatiable desire for understanding to be teased out in front of us, laying a fresh unknown for us to reconstruct. The breaking of assumptions necessitates the forming of a new reality. Personal narratives, physics and memory commingle, rearranging into a reassurance we can feel. If we embrace this poetic moment as an ephemeral state, what happens when we can suspend it for longer? When you can exist in this transitional instance, stand in the threshold’s doorframe, and peer into both frames of reference?
Seeing Nothing, is an artwork that facilitates this encounter. While the work itself is constant, an infinite pulsing circular form arranged among a series of suspended transparent blue panels, the audience’s physical movement through the space alters the possible perception of the piece’s materiality. When viewing the animated colour field directly, the gradient of light from pink to blue is vividly clear. The visual sensation prompts unconscious meaning-making, as each individual finds a relation to the geometric form. When viewed from a position with the die-cast panel as an intermediary object, the colour field collapses into an induced state of colour blindness, enveloping the viewer in an unbroken blue. While this blue is varied and subjective, I recall a fragment from Lee Ufan’s catalogue published by Bijutsu Shuppan in 1986:
“Blue is the most distant colour, difficult to reach as the sky. Containing both life and death, it is the colour of nothingness.”
Being with this full nothingness, I find myself enthralled. I peer deeper into the empty blue searching for the life force that exists a step in either direction yet I cannot see. I find myself intensely looking at nothing.
Words by Alex Lark
Video coming soon
© Images Alex Lark
