Nike Savvas | Living on a Promise
Opening at ARC ONE Gallery, Nike Savvas presents a new body of work that shift and play with our optical experience.
Throughout her practice Nike Savvas is in constant conversation with light. Not limited to set paradigms or processes of working, she pushes the medium of painting beyond its known boundaries, selecting mediums, colour and subject to suit her point of enquiry.
In creating Living on a Promise Nike Savvas responded to a research trip to the archives of MoMA, New York, where she undertook an in-depth examination of the critically celebrated Responsive Eye exhibition, 1965. The Responsive Eye exhibition focused upon objects to be examined. In their lines, bands and patterns or flat areas of colour, the works created new subjective experiences from the contrast of colours, illusions and other optical devices. For the original exhibition catalogue click here.
Contributing to this art historical discourse concerning optical phenomena and colour frequencies, Living on a Promise examines how different optical algorithms produce different outcomes – and occasionally false colours. As Savvas states the works “seeks to dismantle conventional boundaries, overstep thresholds, and … to open into a new world of artificial patterns, optical ghosting, fugitive colours and temporal aliasing”.
The new body of works use striated lines of vertical colour to optically activate space. The repetition of pattern and colour across a variety of screens result in high-vibrancy works that oscillate with colour and light. Meant to be experience in person, they pulsate and play with the viewer’s experience of perceptual register – a juncture between fact and subjective reception. the movement of space and light throughout the works creates an ephemeral experience, as the work warps and changes with the movement of the viewer. Opening 26 October at ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne look forward to being drawn into this blurred state of change and unpredictability.
EXHIBITION
Living on a Promise
24 October – 25 November 2017
ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne
Courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.
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