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The human creature defines the existence of its visual world, not because it sees ‘things’, but because it conceives ‘things’ from the behavior of the light that it sees. What happens when we conceive of light as a ’thing’? What happens when we see the ‘shaft’ of sunlight in the tropical jungle haze after the rain, the ‘beam’ of the headlight in the fog, the lightning ‘bolt’, or the ‘eclipse’? When we see light as form, we create metaphors. We attempt to bring our experience of this elusive agent into our familiar world.
An eclipse is a shadow, an absence present in dynamic motion. An infinite number of them move continuously throughout the universe. If a body radiates light – a star, a fire, a bug – that light expands uniformly into space until it is blocked, absorbed, eclipsed, by some other body. Stellar shadows, 'eclipses', become thing-like, moving and changing in time. Our common experience of the eclipse is at the termination of the light, or at the source. We see the shadow travel across the ground or we see the darkness on the sun. We seldom see that sheath of light surrounding the shadow, giving the absence a presence from beginning to end. If we do – if we see the sun’s corona surround the moon – we see it as a thing far away, not a continuous column of waves/particles streaming to us from that source. Our conception of the light is not as a form extending through space, but as a flattened ‘thing’ at one end or the other.
“Building White/Eclipse” generates a dynamic sculpture using light as the medium. It creates the metaphorical structure of the ‘column’ of the eclipse and the photon ‘stream’. It is at once a metaphor and the essence of the metaphor. Two presentations provide the experience of the metaphorical forms. One, the macrocosm, presents a section of the column rather than the beginning or the end. The other presents the microcosm, the sheath of photons, the wave surfaces, the ‘pencils’ of light. The macro element prevents a viewer's physical interaction; indeed it is intense enough that interacting with it could pose an optical danger if one looked directly into the source. Conversely, the micro element is intentionally interactive and the viewer is encouraged to enter the interior of the light and look into the source along the shadows' defining planes. Stand within the ellipse and look into the source of the eclipse.