Lucas Dupuy, Emilia Kina, Nina Silverberg, Victor Seaward & Will Thomson
9 September - 5 October 2022
Eve Leibe Gallery, London
Installation Views: Noontime Ghosts, 2022, Emilia Kina, Nina Silverberg, Victor Seaward, Will Thomson, Eve Leibe Gallery, London.
Twelve chimes, the clock strikes noon, and the sun is at its highest point in the sky. Shade, shadow and shelter recede. A stillness suffocates the surrounding area and awakens the noontime ghosts. Discharging light, with no escape, the blazing heat of midday defines a point where the soul is most vulnerable to climatic dangers and those who cast no shadows.1
A shadow is a non-displaceable sign with a low survival rate. Cast on the spot, with no proxy, the object doubles and becomes a temporary silhouette for a moment in time. In his essay 'Surrealist Precipitates, Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’, Dennis Hollier asks us to consider the semiological properties of the sign and its deictic nature -‘Smoke is caused by fire; cast shadows by the sun.’2 This recurrent dialogue between cause and effect suggests the shadow's dependency on its source. Highlighting a poetic ambiguity between object and representation - are we looking at a cast shadow? Or its image?
Each artist in Noontime Ghosts explores these ideas at length; capturing stillness in familiar moments and using light as a tool for controlling their constructed environments. Process heavy and aesthetically intricate, the residue left behind from the artists’ interventions could be compared to that of a shadow - a byproduct of making and a marking of existence. Our individual encounters of such spaces are a solitary experience, but our shared presence and interaction with light, by default, make us participants in the work. Entering and exiting, in an unconscious performance.
Thirteen chimes, time resumes and the noontime ghosts are left to retreat.
1. Roger Callious, ‘The Edge of Surrealism’, edited by Claudine Frank, Duke University Press, 2003) pp.126.
2. Dennis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates, Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’, translated by Rosalind Krauss, October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994) pp.6-7.
︎ Exhibition: Eve Leibe Gallery
