While a quantum physicist might demonstrate how light can be both a particle and a wave, the artists in the Art and Design Gallery’s latest exhibition demonstrate that light’s properties go far beyond a mere duality. Featuring the works of invited fine artists and designers, along with FIT faculty, alumni, and students, Picturing Light: Artists Explore Luminosity explores light as the primary focus of a given piece, as opposed to light being a medium to illuminate other things.
The exhibition, on display now through October 27, is organized into four categories—Natural Light, Artificial Light, Reflected Light, and Depicted Light. Pieces featuring Natural Light and Reflected Light are in the sun-filled Pomerantz lobby, where natural light passes over or through the works to transform them as well as the spaces around them. By contrast, pieces featuring Artificial Light are displayed primarily in the smaller, darker gallery space in the back, where light is projected as part of the artwork or emitted from video screens, often in more abstract forms. Finally, the pieces in Depicted Light include oil paintings, film, and photography that give the appearance of light, even though there is no actual light source in the piece itself.
Adjunct associate professor of Communication Design Pathways and exhibition curator Anne Finkelstein said that making use of the distinct areas within the gallery space was always central to the show’s concept. Picturing Light is actually a follow-up to Finkelstein’s first show, back in 2019, called Picturing Space: Artists Imagine Architecture. That show also featured different kinds of scale and media, including sculptural pieces, that used the Art and Design Gallery in unique and site-specific ways.
After that show, Finkelstein claimed she was out of curatorial ideas, but then her husband asked, What about a show about light? The seed was planted, but it would have to wait. Picturing Space was the gallery’s last exhibition before FIT’s Covid lockdown. Accordingly, Picturing Light has been five years in the making; in active planning, for two.
Still, pushing back against the dark times of Covid and our current moment was an important inspiration for this show.
“At this moment, we are surrounded by very scary and dark realities,” Finkelstein said. “The focus on light as a subject is an optimistic decision and in bringing this exhibition out into the world, I want to share not only the work, but the metaphor and the belief behind it. It’s a hopeful and constructive act, a manifestation of our own refusal to surrender. Instead of giving up, we are … picturing light.”
The Art and Design Gallery is located in FIT’s Pomerantz Center and is open daily from 9 am to 5 pm. The exhibition is free and open to the public.