Obscured Light
This art installation entitled Obscured Light is about the haunting fog of memory that resists disapearance, and about the artist’s visual and musical expressions of ghostliness. The project begins with a response to light. In this installation, Veil responds to the color temperature of the site. As a point of departure, the track lights are installed with 6k narrow-beam reflector bulbs and obscured with theatre gels in a restricted palette. This obscured light illuminates a series of 8 theatre posters hung in pairs with titles that present his hauntings.
James Veil installing theatre gels and lighting the site.
Theatre Posters
The theatre is an influential place for Veil, having began his artistic career on stages as a singer and actor. He began a study of theatre posters which have a format of 24” x 36”, and focuses on the bold colors, graphic design and subversive political themes of Polish theatre posters, as well as Constructivist Russian movie posters by the Stenberg brothers.
The subjects of the posters are rooted in Veil’s place of origin in the Peak District of Yorkshire, England. As a child he spent time fell-walking the peaks and dales, amongst the grazing sheep, often finding Neotlithic remnants such as flint arrowheads and artifacts from North Sea cultures. The childhood room which he decorated is represented here, as well as the image of a family stepladder which travelled along with them over several trans-Atlantic emigrations. Genetic variants associated with Alzheimer’s are a concern for Veil, a kind of pre-emptive ghostliness in his family. The layers of history, both forgotten and recorded, past and future, are the source of his haunting. Prints can be purchased here
The 8 prints of the installation are drawn in a limited palette, and hung in pairs under specifically metered color temperatures.
Veil approaches a work of art as a meeting between the materials and the viewer’s consciousness. Working with light and color is also a way of working with the processing mechanics of the brain. The theatre poster, the controlled lighting of the white box gallery, and the sounds occuring in the environment are all linked intrinsically through perception.
Music
The musical part of this installation is structured by the radial grid, which unifies the color palette as well as a musical key signature. He is interested in ghostly figures. As a child in Cold War Britain, living isolated in the countryside, he tuned his shortwave radio to military spy stations like the buzzer of UVB-76, the number signals of The Lincolnshire Poacher or the rotor repeats of the Soviet Duga Radar. The piece is laced with these sequences, which eerily echo the language of the design industry, where color, space and time are specified abstractly by integers and fractions. The four part symphony can be heard here
Pantone™ ink numbers (top left) and Roscolux™ cinegel numbers (bottom left) were matched and selected to unify the installation’s color palette. Plotting the palette on the color wheel (right) and overlaying the Circle of Fifths provided a musical key (D♭ major).
Materials
The posters are printed with the new Epson UltraChrome HDX pigment inks. These inks have a permanence ratings in excess of 200 years, and the pigments resist high-humidity environments. The paper is Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art Paper which is 18mm thich, 325 gsm in mass, 98% opacity, acid, lignin and chlorine free as well as calcium carbonate pH buffered. The colored gels on the lights are Roscolux cinegels comprised of two types of body-colored plastic filters; extruded polycarbonate and deep dyed polyester, both of which provide good durability and heat tolerance.