Catie Newell

 

 

Involving Darkness

 

Nightfall formulates a new city. When light is limited to artificial sources and darkness expands in space, geometries are heightened or masked, symmetries are obscured, masses are erased, color recedes or alters, material distinctions are muted, distances flatten, the air appears to have weight, and its occupants act differently. Through these revisions, the city dissolves into a peculiar optical fragmentation with partially illuminated elements giving the impression of being in suspension, and the adjoining darkened spaces lacking clarity and definition. These compounding immaterial effects distort our spatial perception making the once familiar setting unfamiliar by challenging both the visual appearance of space and its implied conditions of occupation. Our surroundings become formally mutated, and the physical extent of architecture is thrown into question. With its capacity to manipulate and create unique spatial effects, the premise of my research, Involving Darkness, strategically uses a lack of light; revealing new environments and obscuring otherwise recognizable spaces, affording them unexpected dimensions.

 

Developed as a way of seeing, Involving Darkness is a theory of obscurity where specific spaces from different urban contexts reveal another, secret, identity through the investigation of the city after dark. As a stranger to Rome, capturing darkness is my way into a city that I do not know intimately. This is being worked on through an ongoing series of photographs called Nightly. Nightly is a series of portraits of our surroundings in a moment of dark stillness balancing between fear and calm, conscious and unconscious, the seen and the unseen. Always taken after dark, the work suggests another city. One that is vanishing and fleeting into a darkness that removes its walls, alters its spaces, and haunts.

 

There are several criteria by which one can see the works, and the basis by which I hunt the city for darkness:

 

1. Darkness is the primary component of the composition.

2. There are architectural implications.

3. The works are attuned to coloration for tone and mood.

4. There are no human occupants.

5. A very fleeting moment is captured.

6. The source of light is hidden.

 

Found in the sum of the series is the narrative of a present cityscape. Where the buildings are merely partial, the darkness is thick, tangible, and its own material. The occupant is suspended in the same manner in which the buildings seem to float and dissolve. The photograph demands an attentive eye to the detail of what is both seen and unseen, questioning what is lit, and what is found in the darkness.

 

Unapologetically, darkness can be found in all of my previous installation works– from its internal presence and contrast to the necessary source of illumination in Weatherizing, its addition to and containment as a desired effect in Salvaged Landscape, to it as a haunting setting for the transparency of Second Story, and its presence cast as the formal ambiguities of Unlit.

Curfew is a new installation built in Rome alongside this thinking and as a research deliverable for Involving Darkness. The ghosting of a darkened window, Curfew is made of strange and violent spatial lines embedded with candlewicks that are burnt away and trailing smoke. Provoked by the process of a space falling into the night, the work can be seen as the burning away of an urban apparition to the fewest of lines that can be trusted. The title is true to the term 'curfew' (coming from the French phrase ‘cover the fire’). It marks the time to snuff out the candles and fall asleep at a given, mandated, time of night. Curfew more widely is also suggestive of things not being permitted, of danger, trouble, or misbehavior in the midst. Brought on by a lack of trust and the assumption that more trouble lurks simply from missing it.

 

Situated in the ephemeral and fleeting conditions of our surroundings, Curfew was made entirely in the air. Fleeting and vanishing (both physically and in memory) the three-dimensional line work is a dance between recognizable and the imagination projected on to a darkened reality. In its intentions its jarring presence looks to be a moment of transition. Suspended in the threshold between the two spaces, visitors to the show have to occupy the work; literally walking through it. Formally the aim is to evoke a larger sense of space (both real and imagined) and also calling to question the passing from one space to another where perhaps on both sides, different darknesses exist. Its implications and threat of vanishing is the unknown reality, one that seems both familiar and unfamiliar. Curfew remains something that is there amongst us; anxious, fleeting, and aggressive, though even frightened in its own being.