ELISE POLITO

“Planes and voids”

This project explores light within space. It also is a study that transforms the ephemeral into the permanent. Simply, it addresses the experience of being in the world and the idea that everything is a collection of experiences, rather than a fact.  Light captures that idea beautifully for me.

Using a camera, I shot the movement of light through a given space spanning a given time, tracking the light as it moved through a room. The timeframe between each ‘capture’ is not rigid or precise. My decision when to shoot was based on my response to the light in the space - my experience of a moment in time. 

Tacking these fragments of captured light and time, I traced each image onto drafting film. Using a scalpel, I cut out by hand the areas of the original light source, leaving voids that in this space of the installation are active descriptors. The intimate, meditative process of cutting each sheet connected me back to the moment and the place – for want of a simple notion – it captured memory.

As these individual sheets are suspended here, a tunnel of information is formed, physically overlapping ideas of time, memory and place – linking the original light source with this one. This interaction of natural light through the installed work is significant to me. If anything, I feel a sense of trapping moments in the earlier light patterns that change mood when transposed here, with the changing course of each day, and with atmospheric differences. 

It is ephemeral – it is ethereal – it is tangible.  It is the sensuality of light.

- Elise Polito