Jessica Silverman Gallery
San Francisco | California | USA
Oct 13 - Nov 19 - 2016
Jessica Silverman Gallery
PRESS:
https://jessicasilvermangallery.com/exhibitions/let-there-be-more-light-curated-by-jens-hoffmann/
https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Let-There-Be-More-Light--An-illumination/BBBF66E7CA891BF7
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AS FAR AS WE CAN DISCERN , THE SOLE PURPOSE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IS TO KINDLE A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS OF MERE BEING. Carl Jung
Ever since the Big Bang created our universe more than ten billion years ago, our Earth has been bathed in light coming from the sun. Light is mentioned in the third verse of the Book of Genesis—the first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament—in which God creates the world and illuminates it by saying, “Let there be light.”
Light, and in particular sunlight, is an essential source of energy and has an incredible effect on how we wander through the world. Every schoolkid knows that thanks to photosynthesis, plants thrive and grow to serve as an essential part of the food chain, not to mention also producing the oxygen we breathe.
Ever since the Greek philosopher Plato proposed his famous allegory of the cave—that the world we see is not the real world, and that philosophers have an obligation to tell the rest of society about authentic existence outside the cave—light has also functioned as a metaphor for education, knowledge, spiritual and intellectual liberation, and hope. We are “illuminated” or “enlightened” with intelligence; light draws us out of “darkness” by puncturing ignorance with bright “rays” of wisdom.
Over the centuries humans have conjured other sources of light. Fire was the earliest, used in the caves of our ancestors as well as in the candles and spirit lamps that were still the main generators of light after dark only one hundred years ago. Today we rely almost exclusively on light powered by electricity, which began with the invention of the incandescent bulb by Thomas Edison and progressed to fluorescent lighting and contemporary light-emitting-diodes, or LEDs.
“Let There Be (More) Light” features twenty-one artists who use light as a medium, and who look to the early pioneers of neon and fluorescent art for inspiration. There are many connections between light and art. The most direct one is that they both enable enlightenment—one literally, by bringing light into a dark space, and the other intellectually and aesthetically. In “Let There Be (More) Light” the artworks on display are intended do both simultaneously. Indeed, it is difficult not to think of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the context of the exhibition, given the architecture of the gallery space: two tall but small rooms in a cave-like storefront in San Francisco’s bustling Tenderloin neighborhood, a socially and economically heterogeneous zone marked by a distressing and conspicuous collision of concentrated poverty, homelessness, and crime on the one hand and enormous prosperity, wealth, and achievement on the other. The site embodies the contradictory nature of the larger world today in a direct, unidealized, and rather rare manner.
2016