Sculpting space with colored light

By Bonnie Wells

Published on April 13, 2007

The latest exhibit at the University Gallery is all about color. But instead of working with pigment, the two featured artists achieve their effects with light.

"I wanted to do an exhibition on color because it's a mysterious substance," said guest curator Gregory Salzman on a recent tour of the exhibit. "It both has a substance and it's not tangible, and has been, since the time of Cezanne, more and more important in contemporary art."

"The Experience of Color," on view through June 3 at the gallery in the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts, features Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens, who lives and works in Brussels, and Los Angeles artist Diana Thater.

Thater, a professor at Art Center College in Pasadena, who has been exhibiting since 1990, works with video images. But unlike most artists working in the medium, she eschews the narrative quality of video, abstracting elements with enigmatic editing and presentation, to interrupt and open up the viewers sense of time and space.

In the west gallery, an installation bathed in blue light presents three video monitors, resting viewer-side up on the gallery floor, complete with their ansillary wires and gizmos. Images, many drawn from nature, arise and disappear in continuous loops on each monitor, leaving the viewer free to choose from the visual buffet. And to choose differently on a different day.

Another monitor installation, "Dark Matter," swathed in violet light, presents archival N.A.S.A images from deep space.

"It's not about meaning," Salzman said, "but rather the way it alters your perception of time and space. [Thater] thinks that's the way we experience the world today."

Dominating the west gallery's main room is Thater's dramatic "Wallflowers." Washed in orange light, the piece features images projected on the gallery wall: three enormous hot-pink chrysanthemum blooms, which have a 3-D effect and are subtly quivering as if in a light breeze.

The concrete gallery wall is also a featured element in Janssens' installations, which appear in the cavernous main gallery. At selected spots in the dimmed space, slender tripods holding 750-watt halogen lamps fitted with a color filter project plumes of color on the wall. Janssens, who typically creates her ephemeral installations in public spaces, uses the walls' textured surfaces and angles as n integral parts of the pieces.

"It's so wonderful how these concrete spaces come to life," said Gallery Director Loretta Yarlow. It's as if the whole wall is being painted with color."

Or, as Janssens described it, "It's like a prism floating on the wall."

Janssens represented Belgium in 1999 at the Venice Biennale, and has had solo exhibitions in England, Switzerland and Germany.

Her work was included in the recent exhibition "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States" at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

On campus for a gallery talk late last month, Janssens spoke about her work. "All the works are made for what the viewer feels inside," she said. "A lot of my work is from what I am - a personal experience.

For example her bright "Reggae Colors" in reds, blues and yellows, reminds her of the colors of Jamaica. "Blue Sky," recalls her time in Africa.

"Now I live in Belgium where all the time it is gray, so I really need the escape to see the colors," she said.

Winter-sodden New Englanders can relate.

"The Experience of Color is on view through June 3 at the University Gallery, located on the lower level of the Fine Arts Center at UMass. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m. For more information call 545-3670 or visit the Web site www.umass.edu/fac/universitygallery.