Ironic perhaps to visit an exhibition entitled Light Show on the first day of 2013 that I've had any vitamin c and also the day NPower send us an extortionate energy bill. Our interaction with light is a profound sensory experience that determines how we view the world around us and how we feel, but due to modern life's reliance on the screen and on electrical lighting it is a necessary force we reckon with ever single day. This latest show at the Hayward Gallery explores light in everyday modern life.
The first piece you are greeted with us Leo Villareal's Cylinder II. This vast structure containing 19,600 LED lights is programmed to never show the same sequence twice. As with snowfall, the rain, fireworks and Christmas tree lights it is completely mesmerising and encapsulates feelings towards these natural and nostalgic phenomena.
In Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, Conrad Shawcross's manipulation of light lets light lead the way, as it is the light source that manipulates the room and the viewer in this case. His engage robot explores the cube it inhabits and it's viewer beyond, changing the look of both as its pinpoint torch carves its way. The changing cubed pattern shadows take over the walls and bodies of those observing.
In the last room, strobe lights rain down on 27 different water features, causing them to pause and be observed in a completely surreal way. Reminiscent of cling film used to represent water in early Wallace and Gromit films, Olafur Eliasson's Model For a Timeless Garen, felt like a garden out if a horror film. Time and movement are paused and replayed making chutes and arcs of water freeze into the droplets of water they are made up from.
What these pieces show is that light is a manipulator and can also be manipulated. Our overexposure to light in modern life- from smartphone screens being the first thing we see in the morning, to the orange light-polluted London sky being the last thing we see at night- puts light at the centre of modern life.
As the sculptures on show are linked only by their use of light, these theoretical ideas behind the exhibition are a little lost. It did also, at times, feel as though each piece was a little lost in the battle for our visual attention. Still, each piece echoed an aesthetic beauty that makes the show well worth seeing.
It is impossible to escape electrical lighting and being forced so physically into the same space as it in an intense dose at the Hayward is overwhelming, questioning whether the light we use is too much. After receiving my electricity bill, I certainly think electric lighting is something I use too much. It was a relief to step out if the dark light show and back into the sunshine.
