Luminous Matter
Past exhibition
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“Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.” - GoetheSECRIST | BEACH is pleased to present the salon invitational exhibition Luminous Matter. Luminous Matter brings together a group of eight artists that formally and conceptually explore the interconnectedness of color, light, and form. The exhibition includes an intergenerational roster of artists and was curated with the assistance of gallery artists’ Luftwerk, presented concurrently with their debut solo exhibition The Sun Standing Still.Luminous Matter is an exhibition that examines the interdependent and generative relationship between three elemental constituents of visual experience: color, light, and form. Each, in isolation, holds an autonomous aesthetic and conceptual presence; yet, in their convergence, they produce the perceptual and emotional conditions through which we apprehend the world. This exhibition proposes that the meeting point of these three tropes — their overlaps, tensions, and dissolutions — can offer a renewed lens through which to consider the nature of perception itself.While color, light, and form have historically served as fundamental building blocks of visual art, they also occupy complex theoretical terrain. Goethe’s assertion that “colours are the deeds and sufferings of light” provides an entry point into this dialogue: color emerges not merely as a surface attribute, but as an event — a manifestation of interaction, time, and transformation. Light, meanwhile, becomes both a material and a metaphor, shaping visibility and revealing the interstitial boundaries between presence and absence. Form, often regarded as static or structural, is here treated as fluid and responsive, contingent upon the oscillations of both light and color.In this exhibition, these three forces are explored not as fixed categories but as active agents of experience. They are seen as participants in an ongoing exchange between the physical and the psychological, the empirical and the affective. The works assembled for Luminous Matter engage with this exchange through a range of media — from painting and installation to light-based and spatial practices — each probing how visual phenomena can evoke states of emotion, cognition, and embodied perception. In an era saturated by digital imagery and artificial illumination, this exhibition returns to the primal forces of color, light, and form — not as mere formal devices, but as conduits of human experience, capable of evoking wonder, reflection, and the quiet rediscovery of seeing itself.
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In Jan Tichy’s American Nature (after Nauman), three neon works are connected up to radio used by Chicago police in three different areas of the city. Activity on the police scanning frequency around dispatch prompts the neon to activate.
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Shingo Francis' Some Evenings are Bright and Future is Bright dialogue with sunrise and sunset. As one moves around these paintings, their iridescence implies the temporality of the changing sky.
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Within the forms made in James Collins’ two paintings, pattern and imperfection coexist in a submission to the forces of material.
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Larry Bell
SMSW, 1992Vapor drawing on canvas
30 x 30 inches -
In Larry Bell's SMSW, a microscopically thin vapor-deposited film of metallic oxides is laid onto material through a vacuum-coating process, then cut, lifted, and re-layered by hand to disrupt the grid with the artist’s hand while keeping intact the aura of the iridescent.
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Kim Uchiyama's three paintings in Luminous Matter hold subtle differences in color within the artist’s geometric design in which a brushstroke’s neutrality is disproven, and associations, illusions, and possibilities seep through.
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Salon Installation
Yuge Zhou当日之东遇见夜之西 / when the East of the day meets the West of the night places two recordings of the setting and rising of the sun from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean reflecting one another. Yuge's Zhou was raised in China but traveled to the US to study: the work explores her dual identity developed during the separation from her family, especially under Covid travel bans when she was unable to return to China.
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Artists
Andrew Bearnot’s material-focused practice is interested in properties that invoke spectrums, where light and color function also as metaphors for queer identity. As their hand-blown and cast glass contains additive color and interacts with ambient light and projections, the artist thinks deeply about calibration; with their work, how material orients is a discussion also of how one orients to material.Starting with painting, Larry Bell’s practice has evolved into an investigation of light’s behavior, refraction, and projection on surfaces, using panes of glass, mirrors, and thin films. Bell experimented with industrial materials and processes, eventually developing a technique to deposit thin films atop glass that provoke unexpected encounters with light, seeming to capture and absorb it.For James Collins, “process is content” is a critical focus of abstraction. Using the makeup of oil and acrylic—particularly their dissonance—in Collins’ work, the material operates almost independently of the artist, and the resulting forms are uncannily familiar to the viewer. Color and tone are able to achieve a mimicry of landforms, root systems, and canyons through abstract canvases.In Shingo Francis’ work, a confluence of light and color create boundaries, at times shapes, and at others shifts in perception. Within abstract forms, gradating color and elusive separations point to the Californian vistas that influence the artist.With an attentiveness to the geometry of light and space, Kate Joyce captures liminal states of intrigue, suspension, and clarity across photography, text, and installations. With a background in photojournalism, Joyce’s mediums, particularly photography, provoke a relationality between viewer and subject, the latter exploring the passage of time, movement, and migration.Ruth Root fuses hard-edge abstraction with cultural relevance, with shaped canvases exploring color, line, and form coupled with custom printed fabrics. Those collaged fabrics contain found imagery and motifs pulled from media, news, and search engines oriented into patterns evocative of pixillation in the digital age.Across mediums, Jan Tichy creates environments where the degrees to which things can be seen, and how they are seen, probe questions of visibility. For Tichy’s socially and politically engaged work, light reveals or conceals, being both manifest in the formal qualities of the work as well as invoking the notion of fidelity to that which is represented or alluded to.Kim Uchiyama’s abstract, geometric forms are influenced by ancient architecture. For Uchiyama, color is a source of light, and variability in hue develops an atmosphere among a decidedly flat canvas.Yuge Zhou is an experimental video artist and filmmaker. Her work explores themes of migration, difference, and displacement, utilizing the graphic composition of the artist’s media. Exploring places that change as relating to human behavior, nationality, and political difference, she captures these ordinary spaces that become consequential, or reflective of realities.
