Walls & Lights, 6757 Santa Monica Blvd, was the first exhibition produced after relocating my studio to Los Angeles, where I became aware of the constant alternation between the intense brightness of ever-present sunlight and the darkness of interiors designed to escape it. The exhibition was a temporary architectural intervention that also supported a group of cement “paintings” together with gum-bichromate prints made by recording the light emitted from a compact fluorescent spiral.
Two freestanding walls were constructed within the gallery: one small wall set parallel to an existing wall, and a second spanning the width of the space while remaining separated from the gallery wall by a narrow opening. The larger wall divided the gallery into two spaces. The rear space was illuminated artificially, while the front space remained unlit except for daylight admitted through a clerestory cut into the existing front wall that concealed the storefront windows. Light entered the front gallery only through the clerestory and the narrow gap between the new wall and the existing structure.
The title names the fundamental conditions of the exhibition — its walls, its light, and its duration. The constructed walls and clerestory recalled Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’s observation that the white cube retains the legacy of church architecture. The exhibition card carried only the title on one side and, on the reverse, a passage from Abbot Suger, who oversaw the reconstruction of the Abbey of Saint-Denis and its windows. This was the exhibition’s sole accompanying text.
” When the new rear part is joined to that in front,
The church shines, brightened in its middle.
For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright
And which the new light pervades,
Bright is the noble work Enlarged in our time
I, who was Suger, having been leader
While it was accomplished.”— Abbot Suger: On What Was Done in His Administration c.1144-8, Chap XXVIII
