Lights Through Paradox, 2020
LIGHT WINDOWS, UK
The present is a time of disorientation. When we turn our lens to the contemporary, we are confronted by a light scattered by a thousand conflicting voices and myriad paradoxical directions. This fragmentation veils the future in a cloak of unknowability. But how can we live without the unknown in front of us?
Shuster + Moseley, 2020
René Char tells us that the poem ‘rises from its well of mud and of stars’ to ‘bear witness, almost silently, that it contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions’ (René Char, Argument). Like the poem then, our gaze can embrace the scattered play of light and pass through the opening of paradox itself. The psychologist and philosopher Erich Neuman claims that the act of becoming conscious consists not in the resolution of any fixity, but in an unknown, around which our symbols circumscribe.
The lens is composed of fluxing fragments, which describe a spherical form that never resolves into solidity. Referencing the origin of lens-based technologies (using glass left over in the glassblowers kiln), each multi-faceted fragment scatters the light into a disorientating field of vision. Gazing at this fractured lens—through the paradoxical play between orientation and disorientation; form and fragmentation—we hope to invoke a meditation on our place in the universe at the opening of the paradox, ‘in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions’, such that we can embrace the unknown in front of us.
SHUSTER + MOSELEY @shuster_moseley