Night Gallery is pleased to present The Heavy Light Show, a group show featuring Sarah Braman, Carla Edwards, Olivia Erlanger, Laurie Kang, Anne Libby, Connor Marie, MPA, Eli Ping, and Davina Semo. This is the third exhibition in a series of immersive sculpture shows at Night Gallery North, following Samara Golden’s Guts and Josh Callaghan’s Family Tree (both 2022). The Heavy Light Show will be the final presentation in the gallery's current, open floor plan.
The Heavy Light Show brings together sculptures and installations from divergent practices, allowing natural light to exist as a unifying force and a silent collaborator with each artist. While the exhibition title and thesis nods to a provincial Californian history that embraces the liquid light shows of Glenn McKay and canonized “Light and Space” artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell, each artwork on view has its own material and conceptual ambitions. The Southern California sunlight activates The Heavy Light Show and serves as a contextual architecture in place of the conventional atmosphere and armature of the white cube.
Throughout the day, hour by hour, the color of each work changes with the sun. Ensuing viewership is rooted in a shifting perception of otherwise permanent objects. Sarah Braman has embedded a glass cube into the side of an overturned wooden nightstand. The sides of the geometric form are composed of blue and pink glass, casting varying shades of purple across the gallery floor while imparting the hospitable beauty of the domestic space into an industrial cavern. Carla Edwards has cast replicas of the windows of the Metropolitan Detention Center, a prison in south Brooklyn. Five gray casts are suspended from the ceiling and hold slivers of colored glass which, when briefly illuminated, invokes the psychological violence of incarceration.
Elsewhere, natural light catalyzes alchemical events as it comes into contact with sculptures. In Laurie Kang’s architectural intervention Great Shuttle, unfixed sheets of photographic film are housed in steel construction studs. As light touches the surface of the piece, the magnets and steel that scaffold the film become positive space in an ever-evolving photogram. Choose Me, Hear Me, Stuff Me, Stitch Me, Fluff Me, Dress Me, Name Me, Take Me Home by Connor Marie collects eight glass orbs filled with potions. These concoctions combine organic (bile, seawater) and synthetic (Dior Dream Skin Youth-Perfecting Mask) ingredients, each orb possessing its own distinct hue. Placed on a lit pedestal, the work conflates the cleanliness of retail space with shamanistic ritual while simultaneously causing the internal microorganisms to come to life.
As shadows lengthen and contract over the coming weeks, each work will transform in ways that are not yet quantifiable. However, the objects will maintain their essences against the visual cues by which all time is measured—the cycling sun.