I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST THURSDAY, ART IN THE DARK, IF YOU WERE PAYING ATTENTION

photo: Wayne Bund

Laura Hughes: The Span of an Instant at Appendix Project Space
by Victor Maldonado

Usually, when an artist’s work, whatever the media or concepts, look better in the dark, it’s not a compliment and usually meant, like most of the originally intended labels for early modern art, it’s a put-down, deriding the work of art.

But we are living in dark ages and in the case of Laura Hughes’ latest glow-in-the-dark and phosphorescent paints track what the artist terms the “fleeting instances of natural light.” Studiously and judiciously parsing light from dark our eyes strain to acclimate to this queer form of viewing art. We are to assume that the static light forms are the residues of daylight, according to Hughes over a two-week period, during the cresting end of a short and cruel summer.

Notes of paganism and the occult would have been well entertained in Hughes’ second eyes-wide-shut, penetrable, light and space painting installation.

Originally from Canada, freshly graduated with an MFA in Visual Art from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, when she arrived in 2008 to Portland, her more traditional paintings were confections reminiscent of Jennifer Bartlett’s post-minimalist, broken checkerboard, all over compositions “Untitled (diptych),” 2001.

Hughes’ “The Span of an Instant” feels like the sugar high her earlier work only evoked or illustrated. Transforming Appendix Project Space, a two-car garage, always seems the difficulty both for artist and viewer. It’s the inherent limits of this alley-cat venue that Hughes so completely embraces and in the end Hughes by “amplifying the imprint of the peripheral” she has created a site-specific, low-cost James Turrell (but just as transportive), light and space installation that in the sharp basking lights of a conventional gallery, dusk or dawn lighting schemes might appear invisible.

photo: Wayne Bund

In the kitschy-velvet darkness Hughes’ seemingly random design begins to make itself apparent in its dead stillness.

Turrell’s installations also will the viewer into a complete multi-sensory experience. As viewers we submit to its system of displacement and compression. Hughes’ installation does as well, but her strategy is richer, even counter culture in its unabashed use of seemingly arbitrary conglomerations of skeins, tracks of deformed distant reflections and mimicked x-ray vision (unveiling a pre-gallery rehab artifact).

It’s only with the inclusion of the rectilinear form created by the rearticulating of a hidden window into the past that a viewer might find a thread back to Hughes works that more closely resembled paintings.

With “The Span of an Instant” Hughes seems to have evolved her proactive painting practice by recontextualizing notions of what fresco painting can be, and be about, today. For Hughes, light, how it shapes the visible, is her ready-made.

Ultimately, Hughes’ project at Appendix was para-normal even before you actually entered installation because the surrounding environment was made dark as possible. It made the walk from the street even less inviting than usual. No new-vaudevillian theater was programmed for the night. It was easy to walk into the project space and not see
the installation though it was in plain sight. One visitor to the installation seemed to be using his iPhone’s Flashlight App to light the walls in search of the art. Other’s took the cue and charged some parts of the installation more than others. People seemed to be
watching each other interaction with the installation. Body language and physical cues abounded. It’s as if Hughes had positioned the social and relational practices within her three-wall mural. Making performers of us while shaping the visible and performative nature of contemporary painting.