Constructs for Illumination: Claire Fontaine, Nathaniel
Rackowe, Xavier Veilhan
Allsopp Contemporary’s exhibition Constructs for
Illumination, curated by Brooke Lynn McGowan, brings
together three artists who use illumination (both
physically and conceptually) as a primary tool to
enhance, expose or extract meaning from their respective
‘constructs’. These constructs are both
physical, as in Rackowe’s vast installation Dead
Reckoning, as well as academic or even social – as
in Fontaine’s video Counter Poison where she
documents a decrepit Glaswegian theatre that has been
taken over and destroyed by bored youths. Nathaniel
Rackowe’s (b.1975) mammoth 15 metre sculptural work
Dead Reckoning will dominate the main gallery space. A
series of nine post-and-lintel arches constructed from
bitumen roofing, soft timber and sheets of plasterboard
will stretch diagonally across the exhibition space. A
single incandescent bulb runs back and forth along a
track inside this vast architectural environment,
creating shafts of light, reminiscent of doors opening
and closing as it passes by the gaps in the structure.
The searchlight quality of the scanning, moving light
combined with the austere physical presence of
Rackowe’s most ambitious sculptural project to
date, intimidates the viewer as the surrounding gallery
is repeatedly illuminated before falling back into
darkness.