Whitworth Art Gallery - Dark Matters

Dark Matters brings together the work of ten internationally acclaimed contemporary artists who employ a range of technologies, media and machinery. In an exhibition populated by half-seen spectres, visual riddles and distorted reflections, artists engage with ideas surrounding shadow, darkness and illusion. The works are united by themes of temporality, absence, truth, mortality and wonder.

Participating artists are: Brass Art, Pavel Buchler, R. Luke DuBois, Pascal Grandmaison, Barnaby Hosking, Idris Khan, Ja-Young Ku, Elin O’Hara Slavick, Daniel Rozin, Hiraki Sawa

This display of works from the Whitworth's collection reveals ideas surrounding shadow as captured by the artist in a variety of media. Some of the works selected demonstrate how artists have employed tone and darkness to render solidity and structure within the pictorial space. A significant number of paintings, prints and drawings, also convey the symbolic power of shadow to evoke time, mystery, loss and solitude.

                                                           Daniel Rozin - 'Snow Mirror'

With Snow Mirror (2006) Rozin presents us with an image of ourselves, transformed by the digital magic of computer programming. Projected onto suspended fabric, a likeness of the viewer is formed by an accumulation of white snowflakes which cling to the bright areas of the image. The pace is slow and dreamlike. As shadows form within the flutter of snow, the viewer becomes a transparent spectre of themselves, transported by a combination of video, computer and projector.

                                                          Barnaby Hosking - 'Thoughts'
With Thoughts, butterflies serve as a symbol of our inner wonderings.  The luminous and dark surfaces of the individual butterfly wings project both the positive and the negative through elementary strategies of reflection and shadow.  Just as the nebulousness of thoughts allows them to shift between positive and negative without certain distinction, so these clusters of light and darkness project the duality of thinking.

Brass Art - Still Life No.1 (new commission)
(3D objects in acrylic polymer, light source, table in black box environment.Dimensions variable)

For Dark Matters, Brass Art have been commissioned to create a new installation for the Whitworth’s imposing Mezzanine Court. Looming figures and monstrous fusions invoke an immediate affiliation with the nineteenth century phantasmagoria. A simple, travelling light source casts a slowly spinning cavalcade of shadow around the walls and ceiling. Central to the piece, entitled Still Life No. 1, is a table bearing an arrangement of museum specimens, tiny figurines and cellophane – their varying opacities against the bare bulb producing the silhouettes and glimmers which create the play of forms. The tiny figures upon the table are three dimensional representations of the artists themselves, rendered using the latest digital techniques. Through basic tricks of the light they become players in a complex narrative of animal, human and geological interaction.


This exhibition was very different to any other I had visited.  I particularly liked the instalation by 'Brass Art', as it seemed very personal and almost like you were stepping into another world.