DUALITY OF LIGHT

Duality of Light is an immersive environment to be experienced by one person at a time. This work completes a trilogy of interactive installations begun by Lynette Wallworth in 2004 with the piece Invisible by Night, followed by Evolution of Fearlessness in 2006.

Duality of Light allows each visitor to go on a unique and singular journey through a soundscape that challenges our perception of space. In navigating the installation environment visitors encounter another whose surprising presence reveals the Duality at the heart of the work.

Like all Wallworth’s work, Duality of Light utilises the most recent technological tools for immersion and interactivity in order to reveal some of the most fundamental states of human existence.

Duality of Light was created by Lynette Wallworth in 2008. Commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival, produced by Forma and premiered at the SAMSTAG Museum. Assisted by the Australian government through Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Journeys Through Dimensions by John McDonald

Sydney Morning Herald 28th March 2009

Turning first to Adelaide it is undeniable that after years of relentless tedium and technical glitches, multimedia art is entering a phase of new maturity. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the impressive Chinese video artist Qui Anxiong, and Lynette Wallworth is a distinguished addition to the international ranks.

The difference between earlier forms of multimedia art and those of the current generation are easy to pinpoint,

First, there is the huge advance in technological know how with equivalent advances in ease of use, cost and reliability. Next, and most importantly, there is a sense in which artists are no longer overawed or simply titillated by technology. instead, there is a growing understanding that a successful audio-visual work must not simply fool around with gimmicks, it must make use of qualities that are intrinsic to the medium to relate to the viewer in ways that are not possible with painting or sculpture.

This often means creating an immersive or interactive environment that turns the viewer into an active participant. Wallworth does this in a subtle way with her installations Damavand Mountain and Beautiful Sunset (both 2006): the former a view of a snow-topped mountain in Iran, the latter a slow changing vista of the Flinders Ranges. Both are pieces to be inhabited imaginatively, as we follow the slow changes of light and weather. In Damavand Mountain, the occasional appearance of a woman in a chador acts as a surrogate for our own presence as viewer and as a reminder of the unbridgeable gulf that separates us from the landscape.

Yet these works are mere exercises alongside the piece that gives the show it's title. In Duality of Light (2009) Wallworth invites the viewer to walk down a long corridor filled with the sounds of dripping water recorded in an underground cave in New Zealand. As we approach the end of the corridor, our own bodies loom up in front of us as white, ghostly presences. In a flash the bodies are transformed into gridded volumetric shapes, like a scene from The Matrix. we watch as these shapes explode, leaving a screen filled with moving lines and particles- the duality of the title.

As we stand watching this display, we become aware that moving an arm or a leg causes disturbance on the screen and realise that we are looking at our own bodies dematerialised into waves and particles. And yet this cosmic fuzz is still us. We have become translated into a new reality, rewritten by the language of physics, or perhaps religion, for the dematerialised self is also a metaphor for the soul.

Two pieces in the upstairs gallery are just as fascinating. Invisible by NIght (2004) explores the experience of personal grief and the way it isolates us from the world. It begins with the life-size figure of a woman, her head wreathed in clouds. When we touch the screen, she responds, wiping away a small patch of condensation to look out at us with bleary eyes. It is one fragile moment of communication that breaks through the mists of mourning, a poignant and strangely moving encounter with a stranger.

In Hold: Vessel 1 And 2 (2002-07), the viewer picks up a shallow, opaque glass bowl and takes it into a darkened room. Columns of light projected from the ceiling are captured and held by the bowl, which becomes a hand-held screen, showing vibrant images of the night sky taken by the Hubble telescope, microscopic organisms of the Great Barrier Reef and footage of the 2004. The latter is especially significant because the transit of Venus was the ostensible reason that brought Captain Cook to Australia in 1770, when he claimed this land for Britain.

One might tease out many different poetic and historical allusions in Wallworth's choice of imagery but the primary experience is one of wonder. t feels as though one is holding life itself-both microcosmic and macroscopic-in one's hands. The bowl becomes a holy grail, a crystal ball, an offering to the gods of countless different faiths."