Shifting Light

Featuring a suite of twelve new works, 'Shifting Light' continues Lydia Wegner’s ongoing exploration of staged photography and visual abstraction. Conjured from analogue processes that manipulate form, colour, and shape, these works stretch our perception to the limit as xed space and familiar objects are transformed into illusionary abstraction.
Wegner’s works emerge from the tabletop of her studio as the artist carefully layers and balances found objects, coloured and transparent papers, and other visual materials to form ephemeral assemblages. White lights and coloured lighting gels cast sharp lines, bold colour, soft haze, and shadow while mirrors re ect and refract causing a distortion of scale, perspective, and space. These precarious constructions and chance moments are then photographed by Wegner and resolved as inkjet prints. For Wegner, “There’s a kind of magic which happens when I use the camera. You get an image that you may not be able to see by the eye.”
In these works, the viewer is confronted by a flattening of space, a colliding of weightless geometric forms,
blocks of vibrant colour, shadows, sheens, and textures born from their material construction but now released
from it. Recalling the history of formalism, particularly the Bauhaus geometry of László Moholy-Nagy (1895 –
1946), and the conceptual photography of Barbara Kaston (b. 1936), these sculptural studies dissolve reality into pure abstraction.