Presenting ROOMS 16: SUPERLUMINAL
“This is how it all begins: from blinding darkness enters light; soft, beautiful, expanding, violent, maddening, defiant”
ROOMS 16 is all about light, offering an explosion of colour, yet meditating the significance of contrast, of darkness. The darkness behind the light, which serves as a technical tool, an inception of creativity. Together with the artists who make up this issue we seek to illuminate what happens when we stop thinking of light and darkness as binaries, but rather as parts of the same force. The force that drives us to create, destroy and recreate. As featured photographer Ryan Harding points out, one must accept the necessity of scrapping things in order to reinvent. To improve. To excel.
Following this year’s Art Basel – Miami Beach, ROOMS 16 muses the creative processes and emotional influences of three Miami-based artists as Autumn Casey, Farley Aguilar and Bhakti Baxter consider the impact of the Sun City on their work. While the works of contemporary artists often exist by an illusion of lighting and composition, the illusion is accepted as an ancient and indispensable artistic extrication. Further, a focus on light in composition is evident in Pawel Nolbert’s works as he discusses the effect colour has on perception and visual impact. We also talk “lighting” with award-winning photographer Jamie-James Medina, whose diverse portfolio includes dramatic and characterful portraits of Mercury-prize nominee FKA Twigs.
ROOMS 16 explores the realms of digital artistic expression, introducing the work of two extraordinary digital artists, Robert Bell and Andreas Nicolas Fischer. Their compositions are eruptions of light and yet contain within them sinister elements
adding to the intensity of the visual experience. Featured also is onedotzero, a company responsible for creating astonishing digital sensory arts events, and Eduardo Gomes, who uses 3D computer graphics to implement and demonstrate visual artwork.
Without borders or boundaries, Alex Chinneck creates large-scale surrealist illusions. He describes the making of playful public art, the obligation for cultural experiences to be valuable and also the advantage of controlling your art, beginning to end. With The Fashtons, we ponder photo-realism in visual projects for music and fashion and the consonance brought by two separate, yet intertwined and transmittable, artistic modes of expression.
ROOMS 16 cogitates the blurring of liminal spaces, the creation of complex art. The result is art, which breaks boundaries. Art as light and darkness, simultaneously. Art, which is faster than light itself. Art, which is superluminal.
