The reason why I chose this installation is that examining this artwork offers a chance to students to think about the relationship between time, space and material. Also students will explore how movement can be represented with diverse contexts in different ways. This artwork can be seen as a combination of darkness and light. The darkness gives comfortable mood as if you are in your bed in the middle of night and looking at the street light or moonlight smeared through windows. The movement of the lights reminds of the headlights of passing cars. Also the change size of lights seem like some sort of composition. dancing and wisphering stories. Light is visible and invisible at the same time, and ephemeral. This artwork is combination of darkness and light, evokes memories, comtemplation, personal and sacred realm.

 

 

Sandra Selig

 

Brisbane-based artist Sandra Selig works with a range of media – from sound and light works, and smallscale pieces; to works on paper and site-specific installations. Her practice often explores the play between seeing and what is seen, combining the minute or microcosmic to the large and macrocosmic.

The work invites the audience to move into it, becoming a part of the space, the shapes, the light and the movement created through the projections. The soft sound of the paper shifting, moving from side to side around the surface is amplified in the space through speakers, so it becomes an immersive visual and aural installation.

 

It is worth analysing for students how Sandra Selig has used art elements and principles, including shape, light, movement and sound to create aesthetic qualities;

 

• Must artworks be permanent or can they be temporary or ephemeral?

• Can documentation of temporary performances or artworks be art?

• What art elements and/or principles do you see in this work?

• Listen to the sound. Why do you think Selig included audio as a part of the work?

• This work provides you with slight clues about the gallery space (wall colour, corners, size)?

• After experiencing this work, imagine the gallery without the projections. What would the space look like? (Mathews, n.d.)

 

 

Graduating in Visual Arts and Honours in 1995, Sandra Selig has progressed to be one of Brisbane’s most renowned installation artists. Sandra works predominantly in installation and is best known for her linear thread installations, featuring at various exhibitions including and not limited to Circuit, 2006 at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

 

Sandra Selig is influenced or rather associates her practice strongly to artists such as Lygia Clarke, Gertrude Goldschmidt (Gego) and Jesus Raphael Soto. She has been increasingly interested in artists from this period (post 1960’s geometric abstraction in Latin America) because of the entropic use of geometric form in their work, which in different ways, strongly connects to the viewer’s unfolding, temporal experience of it and to the artists sometimes heroic pursuit of personal freedom and spirituality through abstraction in art. Selig collects images and information from sources traditionally outside of art history such as science and astrophysics; fields that also attempt to create patterns, which reflect intangible aspects of human existence in relation to the cosmos.

 

To a further extent Selig is influenced from the music that she creates for herself, and for sound installations. There is a strong connection between Selig’s music and artistic pursuit. For example one of the origins of Selig’s ongoing thread installations comes from wanting to make an object in space that approached the presence and intangibility of music. Living and working in Australia, Selig has been based mainly in suburban areas, working mostly from a domestic environment. In this way, her work reflects a personal world where everyday experiences are woven into concentrated periods of making and working with abstraction. In regards to the Universe series, it is easy to see what impact the domestic environment has on Selig’s art in terms of examining and making work from spider’s webs. The concept of intangibility and the pursuit of unveiling what cannot be seen by the human eye are central to Selig’s practice. (Langlasse, n.d.)

 

Selig has mentioned before that she often found herself drawn to ‘lightweight’ materials. These works have a very clear relationship with the surfaces on which they sit. Even the large suspended work is anchored firmly to the ground with large stones. Nowhere in this show do we find the sleek regularity of Selig’s linear installations. Instead there is a tension between materials and their arrangement. While there is often still a strong geometry to these works, the patterns themselves appear random, tempered by an organic quality and exploration of colour. The virtual ‘volume’ evoked by the artist’s previous work is partnered by ‘mass’ as a key component of these new pieces. If the aerial suspension of Selig’s work has previously been a defining feature, both Circuit and ‘Ground’ appear to be very much about bringing the form back down to earth. (Pedersen, n.d.).