There is something subversively exciting about viewing Jacqueline Humphries’s exhibition at Dia’s Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton.
It might be a latent thrill from teenage years spent combing the racks and shelves at Spencer’s Gifts or in the louche cool of dank blackness in a cavernous nightclub, but the atmosphere created by the darkness of the room illuminated only by black light and fluorescent painted objects feels a bit naughty.
That the works realize their full potential through a technological alchemy that creates its own light adds a layer of retro-wonder and au courant cool to the installation. Here, the electrons in the fluorescent pigments in and on cast and 3-D printed objects absorb UV radiation in black light to become “excited” and then emit their own visible light. The objects’ banality (plywood, a sign) or kitschy charm (shells and driftwood in honor of the nearby beach, copied from real objects the artist found on the North Fork) helps place the artwork in a post-postmodern context.
Ms. Humphries varies the degree of saturation between her objects so that some seem starkly opaque and others have a fleeting luminescence. She embeds a Dia logo in some of the flat expanses, playing with the text as visual element in an artistic branding exercise.
“Black-light art is a cliché,” she says in the exhibition brochure. “I liked to think that I could redeem it somehow, make it fresh again. I thought, What happens if I put the whole painting in this machine? What if I just change the entire light conditions of the painting?”
The Dia Art Foundation chooses artists whose mediums and styles complement Flavin’s own fluorescent light sculptures, drawings, and other creative output. These works create a kind of inverse universe to Flavin, who used colored and white fluorescent light to make sculptural objects. His pieces were constructed from industrial materials that often worked in tandem with architecture to stand as object and an immaterial medium that dissolved corners or displaced walls.
Ms. Humphries, who divides her time between New York City and Southold, makes physical objects that emit light without bulbs in the darkness. The show has only 10 works, but given their intensity and fullness, 10 works are plenty. They function both as sculpture and as hovering paintings on air. But she also works with architectural elements of the exhibition space, including her own corner piece in this installation.
The genesis of this series was a studio fire in 2005 that destroyed much of what she had created before that date. These works, emerging out of darkness (or ashes), have that feeling of renaissance or the oft-cited phoenix. She has worked on other series since that time, but this one is most akin to the rest of the Bridgehampton space. One crossover from her other work is the emoticon smiley faces that make it into the resin on the surface of “Painting,” a cast from a painting she made three years ago. This she blends with a printed piece of driftwood, uniting two of the creative impulses in her work.
The organizers make the point that these objects are referents, i.e., not the objects themselves but cloned from other sources, typically digitally generated. This puts them in league with virtual reality and all manner of manipulated or imagined objects and experiences with which we are currently overwhelmed in the art space and the world in general. Such mediation between the real and the digital is particularly prevalent in how we communicate with each other and express ideas.
From a more traditional art historical vantage point, the production of these objects also refers to seriality, but in a new context. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, fine art was concerned with the advent of mechanical reproduction through the rise of photography. Although art had been reproduced for centuries through bronze casting and printing processes, the photograph, an almost perfect reproduction of nature made by a machine, took away the specialness of naturalistic painting.
Here we sense a further evolution of such matters, submitted for consideration now that enough time has passed to gauge the consequences of what was once new technology. Dressed up in adorably bright Day-Glo, these objects tend to accrete more and darker meaning upon further reflection.
Even if you have seen the Flavin pieces scores of times previously, there is much to gain from making the trek upstairs once you have seen the Humphries pieces, or vice versa. These works are clearly made in dialogue with the Flavin sculptures, and both artists’ works are enriched by the comparisons and contrasts.
The exhibition will remain on view through May.