Light Falls
Liadin Cooke
Marcia Hafif
Mark Joyce
Sofie Loscher
Scott Lyall
Bridget Riley  

Opening receptions on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May, 2015, 6-8pm

Exhibition runs from 15th May - 11th June
Gallery open : 10am - 6 pm ( Wednesday - Friday ) and 11am - 3 pm ( Saturday ) 

Marcia Hafif  Shade 2,  2013,  oil on canvas, 6 parts ( each  46 x 46 cms ) 

Light Falls alludes to the thinking behind the next exhibition at Green On Red Gallery.  Light is a subject that has concerned artists not confined to the short list presented here.  The new gallery is surrounded by walls of daylight on 3 sides and enjoys dramatic, light-filled views of a changing part of the city.  How light inhabits the scene is a source of constant attraction and play.  

The list of artists pitched here against this backdrop includes a broad church of artists from different generations and working in a variety of media.  All artists address the idea and the physics of natural light - or harness its movement - in specific ways.
 

Marcia Hafif, who is the subject of a number of solo exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. in May and June this year, shows in the gallery for the second time in 20 years. Hafif's monochromatic matte Shade series of oil paintings absorb light with their carefully hand-painted soft canvas surfaces.  The individual planes of rich colour project from the wall on the deep stretchers, seeming to hover in space. 

Bridget Riley's eloquent description of an early experience of natural light has been a touchstone for her as an artist and is brought into play here in Light Falls in her gouache 4th Revision of May, Bassacs.  She recounts :

Swimming through the oval, saucer-like reflections, dipping and flashing on the sea surface, one traced the colours back to the origins of those reflections . . . The entire elusive, unstable, flickering complex subject to the changing qualities of the light itself. On a fine day, for instance, all was bespattered with the glitter of bright sunlight and its tiny pinpoints of virtually black shadow - it was as though one was swimming through a diamond.

The dynamic interaction of line, colour and form in her paintings is echoed, three dimensionally, in Sofie Loscher's shimmering new sculptural work in wood and polaroid.  She is showing in the gallery for the first time.  

Scott Lyall's Eve prints take a single colour pixel and mathematically adjust it through an algorithm, resulting in large prints which are highly dependent on the lighting conditions in which they are shown.  He says 'The Eve's  . . . , like Platonic forms, can circulate in cyberspace at will, awaiting their moment of local incarnation.'
 

Liadin Cooke's delicate organic " Stacks " of water and colour convey a sense of the subtle and elusive quality of light itself.  She states "it struck me that I needed to look at the basic things in my life".  Cooke subsequently translated ' ordinary ' objects into the fundamental elements of form and colour. 

Mark Joyce will deliver a talk in the gallery in June to coincide with his participation in the exhibition. His work, which explores the anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience fit perfectly into this exhibition.