LIGHTING: Defying Space

General idea is that space encompasses lighting. Space uses lighting as a tool to accentuate its forms and structure. Along the way, lighting design changed in its form and technology, but preserved its functionality,to illuminate space especially at night or in the dark. Creating lighting products around the space only emphasizes the same idea of space coming first and then lighting second. However, installation artists have been experimenting space/lighting relationship. Their work shows that the space is the quality of light and, further, that without lighting there would be no space. Art installation has been an area where artists could through lighting push the boundaries of space, its meaning, and perhaps defy it. From simple usage of common products such as fluorescent tubes, to LED, artists rebel against space’s architectural structure, static quality, and its imposed boundaries.

The expected function of a lighting fixture is to illuminate a space. It is mostly used to complement the environment it lives in.

By sitting in the corner of the wall, the piece breaks the continuity of the walls. The structure of the space is somehow modified by the installation. The bright color washes away the whiteness of the wall and become the focal point.

Untitled, Dan Flavin

The artist uses the light fixtures not to accentuate the space, but each other’s light, creating a point of intersection. The resulted shape stands out of the wall. The space becomes flat while the light becomes almost a free standing, three-dimensional form.

Aquarium et Bluette, Ann Veronica Janssens

Made out of multiple lighting fixtures facing a black wall, in this piece, the lighting creates a illusion of space. It breaks the boundaries set by the physical space. The lighting fixtures turn on and off in sequence, so there is also the illusion of movement. The use of multiple of lightings as well the manipulation of them, takes the viewer beyond the living space.

Beauty, Olafur Eliasson

The LED installation takes the whole dark room. The viewer standing in the middle of the piece is led to a state of trance, where all the boundaries, the matter of the physical space is taken away, to a floating feeling. The light installation is able recreate a sense of no space.

Matrix II, Erwin Redl