Light Show

Overview

Unless you’re living in a hammock in the woods, chances are you’re surrounded by artificial light for half your day. Whether you’re working under fluorescents in the office, finishing the latest Booker Prize-winner by your bedlamp or manoeuvring your way along Victoria Road’s constant red-lit jam, artificial light changes the way we move through our day, how we feel, how we interact with Sydney every day. But we usually take it for granted — until Vivid rolls around. That's where light artists come in, to remind you of the possibilities and straight-up power of one of the most customisable and underrated technologies we've got.

MCA’s brand new exhibition Light Show, one of its most ambitious undertakings yet, extends the Vivid Sydney focus on using light as an artwork; bringing 19 works from the 1960s to now that use light as the medium. Opening on Thursday, April 16, the exhibition comes from London's Haywood Gallery after sold-out showings there and record attendances at Auckland Art Gallery. It’s not a chronological survey though, you’re not signing up for a history lesson. Instead, Light Show is a highly playful, wonderfully immersive exhibition that will have you rethinking your kitchen down lights — in the same way the recently opened Luminous show did. "As visitors, your experience becomes the work,” says Haywood Gallery curator Dr Cliff Lauson. “Light shines upon the subtleties and changes of perception."

Two works popping up in your Instagram feed daily will be David Batchelor’s Magic Hour and Carlos Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation. While Batchelor's sculptural work balances dirty, found light boxes with a pure spectrum of projected light, Cruz-Diez has created an immersive environment we hope doesn't get too scuffed over the course of the show. To recreate the 1965 work, the Cruz-Diez studio has worked with the MCA to create three adjoined rooms of different fluorescent light projected on white-painted walls. It’s inescapably similar to Olafur Eliasson’s 2002 work 360° room for all colours or even his 1997 work Room for one colour, both of which were cornerstones for the MCA’s Take Your Time blockbuster exhibition in 2009/10.

There's plenty more colour and light where that came from. Cerith Wyn Evans’ genuinely hypnotic work S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E (‘Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill) — actual title, go with it — sees elegant pillars of light bulbs pulsating in space. Evans’ work glows beside NYC-based artist Leo Villareal’s Cylinder II; a four-metre-high work built of over 20,000 computer controlled LEDs which Villareal developed and programmed his own computer software to control. These two works alone are worth your visit.

Brigitte Kowanz’s 2013 Light Steps hover elegantly in the main exhibition passageway as a divine, minimalist play on a 'Stairway to Heaven', while legendary, pioneering light artist Francois Morellet uses the most customisable of light technologies — the fluorescent tube — to create his 2006 work Lamentable. Morellet almost literally uses light as a pencil — ‘drawing’ a mangled, minimalist circle in the space. Those with vertigo or motion sickness might want to face their demons with Conrad Shawcross’s 2009 work Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV — one of the most simultaneously mesmerising, exciting and physically nauseating works you’ll come across in the show.

Light Show is one of MCA's most playful, engulfing and eye-pleasing shows yet, one of the best journeys through light art since the Eliasson show. You can see it during Vivid, when the gallery will be staying open every night until 9pm. You won't look at your bedside lamp the same again.

For the duration of the Light Show exhibition, MCA is partnering with the QT Sydney hotel on Market Street, offering a special package for art-seekers. If you book a night at the super stylin' QT, you’ll receive two tickets to MCA’s Light Show and receive breakfast at Gowings Bar & Grill the next morning. Head over here for more details.

Check out our other picks of the best art shows to see in April.