Weight of Light

Light materializes the invisible and the impossible.

Ideas of light have been grafted upon fertile metaphorical, empirical and alchemical weights for millennia. The spark of illumination in a darkened volume has not only inspired philosophies of vision but also those of scientific research, the imagination, and spiritual transcendence. Increasingly, mediums of illumination can be controlled in degree and in temperature as well as channeled through a widening array of bodily and mechanical apertures.

Our capacity to control light makes it an ideal medium to unlock some of the mysteries of our material world while opening vast new chambers of secrets and virtual geometries. In some instances, flickers of light enable an approach to the unconscious or unlock a latent atheistic spirituality that permeates images of light and the vanitas of its eventual dimming, while at other times, artists unlock expansive spatial dimensions that exist at the edge of the visible world, occasionally broaching wondrous indulgences of mild hallucinations. The exhibition Weight of Light is a site to appreciate how light projects meaning into darkened volumes and to revere a darkness that helps one to see deeply.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.