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Cerith Wyn Evans
Untitled, 2008

Installation view: Cerith Wyn Evans – The What If?... Scenario (after LG), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe | TBA21

Collection

Cerith Wyn Evans

Fluorescent tubes, metal, wire
Overall dimensions variable

The classical structure and architectural quality of these four untitled light sculptures evoke the timeless design of the fluted columns of ancient temples. Rather than functioning as supports, however, these sculptures are suspended in space. They do not touch the ceiling and are slightly removed from the floor. The luminous elegance of the fluorescent tubes and their proportional vertical stacking conjure a kind of neo(n) classicism: a Las Vegas version of a classically proportioned support, a flamboyant mimicry, or stage set for a grand spectacle. Their presence is not felt materially but as a phantom form, a protuberant emanation of heat, energy, and light. In fact, these structures radiate so much light and heat that looking at them is all but impossible. Their force fields arm them with a resistance to becoming one of the passive surfaces that surround us in our everyday lives. The overwhelming amount of light erases any notion of space or time and engages us in a “perverted” reflection on perception as such. Visitors are immersed in an ethereal environment inducing a hyperreceptive state in which they are invited – in a phenomenological sense – to a search of the self and an altered experience of the object. The visible and the sensible are seemingly disassociated, and their roles and agencies, as well as those of subject and object, seem at least confused if not inverted.

*1958 in Llanelli, United Kingdom | Living and working in London, United Kingdom

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