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.
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