“Visual art has the capacity to bare perception to itself and, for this, light is the ultimate instrument.”
Darkness
My Light Dance artwork begins in total darkness. I remove all light from a space to clear perception. Without light, the eye has nothing to “grab onto,” no surface to begin to see distance, or edge to infer a corner. In darkness, the visual brain waits in a state of potential.
A sliver of light
I introduce “pieces” of light cast from my body. Geometric units—points, lines or circles—become visible when the light meets material surfaces. For example, a light cone reaches out from my body and becomes visible as an ellipse when it hits the wall. In stillness, the ellipse conveys no depth information. It is a two-dimensional figure in perception. Light Dance creates a “low-dimensional" visual environment and studies how the brain constructs a world in experience.
Articulated illumination
With the slightest movement, the ellipse dimensionally expands. From a two-dimensional sequence, the brain constructs a three-dimensional form.
With movement, two circles projected from the arms generate higher-order geometries in the minds of the viewers, clearly of a different spatiotemporal order than the host environment.
The cylinders grow in size and speed with distance from the body. The structure and rules of the space defined by the light begins to reveal itself.
Radial geometries extending from the body
With movement, the original, geometric units of light generate complex geometries in perception. Light Dance uses light in the manner of vision. Simple, local units of light information reach out from my body, composing structures in perception over time. Light Dance inverts the ordinary function of light. It is used not to light the material world, but to raise awareness of perceptual construction. Light Dance is a seeing process made visible and collective.