Won Ju Lim, "Kiss d3", detail, 2007, Plexiglas, light, Overall dimensions: 8 x 60 x 16 inches
GOETHE’S CHAMBER
Linda Connor, Patsy Krebs, Won Ju Lim, David Maisel, Tokihiro Sato and David Simpson
January 8 – February 28, 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 8, 2015, 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Goethe’s Chamber is a group exhibition that invites visitors to reconsider vision as an embodied, subjective and durational experience, continuously augmented by emergent technologies and theorized from various vantages throughout the ages. Located at the intersection of science and fiction, the exhibition’s title is an allusion to polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s pioneering work The Theory of Colour (1810). Rather than offering a cohesive doctrine, Goethe’s study attempts to reverse previous accounts of optical experience with a catalogue of vividly described phenomena produced via his experimentation with color, shadow and light. While the scientific veracity of some of Goethe’s claims was subsequently challenged, the work marks a turning point in the evolving conception of vision, and deeply influenced vanguard colorists such as J. M. W. Turner and Vasily Kandinsky. As the scholar Jonathan Crary observes, “It is a moment when the visible escapes from the timeless incorporeal order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body.” Assembling a diverse group of established artists whose inventive practices—their own experiments with shadow and light—reinvigorate their chosen media, Goethe’s Chamber encourages visitors to become active participants in the phenomenological encounters staged by each of the artworks on view.
