Color and Light exhibition pt. 1

Exhibition Website

Artworks by Greg Lock and Fritz Horstman are among the works currently on display at the Color and Light Exhibition held at Western Connecticut State College.

For this group exhibition I showed seven pieces of art.

The theme of light is not a primary focus of my practice, even though photography, which I use extensively, is fundamentally the study of light. For this exhibition I considered the piece below, which was captured during the Transart residency at "Untethered Magic" in Nairobi, Kenya.

Untitled (square light in Kenya) 2024 - Digital Photograph -Greg Lock

The picture is simply a photograph of a square flashlight shining on the hillside across a deep gorge.

Less simply, I was training my flashlight on noises in the darkness. I heard a lion and wondered if I could catch a glimpse of it. The square light is the practical residue of the flashlight zoomed to its full extent and is essentially a projection of the square LED array inside the mechanism of the light itself.

I like the photo. I stopped looking for the lion in order to take this image. I used a tripod and a camera; it was a deliberate composition.

Simulated light

Fast forward a few months and I had been to Svalbard to see some of the planets most majestic glaciers and was playing with virtual reconstructions of the mighty ice forms. I am constantly exploring the value that these digital reconstructions have, and thought for this exhibition opportunity to explore light beyond the atmospheric simulations of sky domes. The Kenya photograph served as a starting point for this new work (below).

Untitled (pinklight) 2024 - Pseudo photograph, virtual environment - Greg Lock

What did the addition of the light offer to my PhD journey?

I attempted to project a deep red light onto the surface of this model but the simulated ice absorbed most of the redness, leaving only the pink square, in fact inside the virtual environment I could not find a way to project a deeper red colour. This was unexpected, but practically thinking it was perhaps predictable and possibly physically-accurate. If I were to actually shine a red beam of light onto the glacier it would likely look like this. (note to self shine a red light onto snow to test this idea).

This rendering above is a test composition, focussing on qualities of the simulation of the light on the surface of the glacier model. This revealed some issues with the glacier model but proved the idea that square coloured light projection was a possibility.

As a direct extension of this piece I worked with another glacier model, this time of a cave, inserting an imaginary light inside. This video is a combination of still photographs and 3D models.