I thought I'd picked Prussian blue for my office walls. But over there, where morning sunlight bleeds through the blinds, it's a kind of royal blue. Just above, in the relative shade, something close to navy predominates. To my right, where the diffused sunlight collides with the fluorescent effulgence from the upturned sconce, the blue is as Carolina as it gets.
Sometimes I need this little reminder that color is as much a matter of light as of pigment, or of any internal material. This is an essential lesson of art, a "Duh!" for any practicing artist worth his linseed oil. But the essential mechanics of how the eye processes reflected light into color remains an endlessly fascinating preoccupation for artists, as proved by the exhibition Glow, through Feb. 14 at the Contemporary Arts Collective.
Organized by former CAC board member Eric Murphy, the show offers luminous works by Murphy and four other artists who participated in residencies at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada.
Murphy's paintings, "Anti-Bustication Comet" and "Bustication on the Green," use pigment and automotive urethane to explore the internal relations of colors to each other. It's a time-honored project, best exploited by pointillist painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. But, instead of guiding the mind to an imagined amalgam of tones, Murphy's paintings invite close inspection of their minute parts, the investigation of how what you constitute at a distance has been composed minutely on the surface of the painting. In both paintings, Murphy centers a soccer-ball-like circle in distinctive backgrounds. The play of figure and ground sets the stage for the perceiving eyes' labor with radiant lines and dots, patches of metallic points and layers of pale amber.
Ingrid Mary Percy's ink-jet prints also probe internal sources of "glow." Titled "Atomika," the suite of nine mounted prints takes off from a child's illuminated push-pin game. The configurations describe molecular structures, and their various electronic distortions register the transitions between two entirely different types of internal illumination, from the game board to the computer screen.
Mike Pelletier's two works investigate this latter radiance. "RGB(h)" and "RGB(v)" respectively project onto a wall horizontal and vertical lines of video color that converge, consume each other, and reemerge as secondary and tertiary tones. It's the basic mechanics of video, which of course is the ultimate example of the mind composing what's placed before it, in this case streams of colored dots. Here, an external beam of light reconstitutes what had been the internal glow of a computer screen.
One of Kazuko Kizawa's plastic and polyvinyl-chloride constructions shares an adumbrated alcove with Pelletier's projection. "Color-light 1" does its work under a single spotlight, while "Color-light 2," displayed in the gallery's storefront window, basks in shifting sunlight. In both cases, strips of colored plastic in cubic grids of transparent plastic, range from hot pink to mellow red-orange, depending upon the light conditions and the angle of view. The effect is so simple it's nearly simplistic, as the titles imply.
On the other hand, Robbin Deyo's paintings are deceptively simple. The four oval paintings consist of quarter-inch layers of wanly toned encaustic on canvas, a minimalist exercise with rich results. The wax is translucent, both absorbing and radiating ambient light so that, again, both angle of view and intensity of light-source change everything. But if you don't get it, they're just four ovals of pale color.
It is worth asking, though, what you get if you get it. Kizawa's sculptures can be fascinating for a minute or two, but they're not telling us anything we don't already know. Similarly, Glow has its pleasures, both physical and intellectual, but little in the way of afterglow.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.