In the darkened gallery spaces, three multi-media installations, light-generating sources, and the effects that they create mark the passage of time and atmospheric effects.
Featuring the work of James Geurts (Melbourne), Andreas Schmid (Berlin), and Christine Sciulli (New York City), Atmospheric Events brings together three multi-media installations that consider the ephemeral, mutable aspects of our environments—natural, architectural, and individual—and how we experience and perceive the atmospheres around us.
In Andreas Schmid’s Lichtungen installation (Clearings), the immediate environment of the exhibition space is gradually transformed as 19 freestanding vertical neon tubes, modulated by a computer program, slowly shift in colour and intensity. As it progresses through the modulations, the artwork becomes an exploration of the effects of changing light on the surrounding architecture and on the visitors’ perceptions of time and space as they move throughout the gallery.
Christine Sciulli's Breath of the Sea is a site-specific 10-channel video installation. In this work, volumes of bunched and gathered translucent tulle are suspended from the ceiling of the High Gallery and cascade down and around the architectural features in the space. Kinetic arcs and circles of white light are projected into the undulating contours of the suspended tulle in an ebb and flow of line, shape, and luminosity, evocative of the slow pull and pulse of the ocean’s rhythms.
The video work by James Geurts, titled FATHOM I: Wilkinsons Point (approx. 40° S), was recorded where industrial waste interposes the brackish reaches of the River Derwent in Tasmania. During the video shoot Geurts exposed the circuitry of his camera to the atmosphere of the site as a way to draw out the effects of residing magnetic anomalies generated through the layers of heavy metal deposits, permitting moisture, temperature, light, and salt air to disrupt the digital colour fields. The resulting two-channel video, through pulses of light and colour, forefronts how the physical atmosphere can alter technology and consequent perception.
