Natasha Johns-Messenger & Leslie Eastman

NATASHA JOHNS-MESSENGER & LESLIE EASTMAN
LIGHTMATTER
9 July – 13 November 2021

STATION | SYDNEY

Resources

LIGHTMATTER is an experiential exhibition presented by collaborative artists Natasha Johns-Messenger and Leslie Eastman, created in response to the unique architecture of the site. The installation consists of both intimate and monumental interventions into the fabric of the gallery, considering the space and the audience’s encounter with it as a totality.

LIGHTMATTER continues the artists’ ongoing exploration of the qualities associated with pictorial representation in its expanded form. Utilising a host of ambitious and innovative approaches to installation, the exhibition works with natural and artificial lighting to engage themes of classical perspective, displacement, opacity and transparency.

The installation questions the demarcation between traditional oppositions, such as the internal and external, the subject and object, and the perceiver and environment. The works dwell on the threshold between, using ideas of interpenetration and porosity, light and transparency, and their resulting shadow and opacity, to reveal productive tensions between these apparent distinctions.

These perceptual encounters are designed to enable the viewer to recognise themselves perceiving – to understand their own role in creating an experience of the real. The fundamental implication here is that we all play a role in authoring our world. This is the transformative dimension of this work.