Experience and Memory
Light Box No. 130 (2017)
"Light Box Light”
Artist Statement
The video at this link explains the genesis of the light box series: http://vimeo.com/18552820
"The primary influences on my work have been French Impressionism, and its emphasis on the representation of the sumptuous effects of light, and hard-edge American geometric abstraction. The 'Light Box' series is the result of my continuing interest in, and study of, those two schools of art. If a word could sum up each of those diverse endeavors, I would say 'Memory', the recollection of experience, is the focus of Impressionism, while the thrust of Geometric Abstraction is 'Experience' itself, the act of making and seeing the work.
In the beginning, I asked, “How can I paint in a way that represents light?” Years later, I asked, “How can I paint with light itself?”
Over time, I realized we do not ‘see’ a painting, but rather nothing more than wavelengths of light reflected from the canvas. But, that ‘nothing more’, a neuro-optical event at the back of the eye, is everything. For there, in the instant when immaterial photons strike the optic nerve, is the beginning of memory. So, the primacy of image gave way to its essential medium – not paint or canvas – but light itself, and the experience of light.
'Light boxes’ are the improbable and inadequate – yet to me, surprising – solution to my questions. Through them, I learned to ‘paint’ by combining wavelengths, instead of pigment, to make colors that have no name – because, unlike paint, they are neither stable nor have an ‘edge’. This new, translucent color was made of continuous evolutions of hue resolving into one another so imperceptibly that their margins were indistinguishable.
And the color-structure changed as I moved – making precisely what I ‘saw’ extremely difficult to remember. Thus, memory, came into play, and posed a new question: Which has preference: experience, the primal and momentary nature of perception, as something that is ‘real’, or the lingering, dream-like nature of memory that is not?
Working through the various 'light box' series over a decade, I have sought to integrate these two seemingly opposing phenomena: the cool and rational character of perception, and all of its categorizing impetus, with that warmer realm: the dreamy world of memory, the irrational storehouse of experience, which is the essence of existence - an essence with which we are only ever partially acquainted.
Marc F. Wiegand, October 2018
