After experiencing the Arctic’s midnight sun and polar nights, London-based artist Jessica Rayner found inspiration in the role of light in human life.
“This [experience] made me question what happens when our main source of light — the sun — isn’t available to us?” Rayner said via Skype at the launch of her Faces of Light exhibition at Taipei’s Bluerider Art Gallery on Saturday.
Her first solo exhibition in Asia is an attempt to answer that question.
Photo: Sofia Kuan
Light, darkness and color all work together in her collection to show how they shape the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Visitors on Saturday were mainly drawn to the diverse uses of dancing lights and hues in all the pieces, and the strong emotions these convey. Throughout all her works, Rayner uses inanimate objects like orbs, lenses, glass and prisms to capture images that are impossible to see with the naked eye.
The series Awareness of the Light shows Rayner’s ability to draw on the surrounding environment as a means to create art. Visitors to the gallery are welcomed by four aluminum canvases etched with what seems to be a dancing rainbow, but are, in fact, a large plastic Fresnel Lens, a kind of prism, hung in front of a window. She allowed it to dance as the sun’s rays broke through it, capturing a choreography of movement and color.
BEFORE NEWTON
Rayner also brings the viewer back in time with the Before Newton series. These are gray scale glass paintings that are meant to represent how people perceived objects and light before Newton’s discovery of the color spectrum.
The images are more jagged and geometrical in comparison to the rest of the works but they strongly suggest a time when concepts of light were more rigid.
“Everything has a history and story of process and that is something that I’m very interested in with my work,” Rayner said.
In her series Afterimage, Rayner experimented with the change of light throughout the day by photographing square prisms using a Polaroid camera and different filters. The resulting images are colorful yet unclear and off-focus, but purposely so.
Rayner said that her pieces are an attempt to communicate feelings and states of being that are open to interpretation rather than straightforward messages.
At a time when much of the media we consume is over processed and leaves little room for the imagination, it’s refreshing to encounter young artists like Rayner, who employ an abstract yet unpretentious approach.
“Nothing is objective, we are constantly evolving,” Rayner said. “I want [my art] to be more of a mood and an experience and the idea that we are in the midst of a long history. We are here just for a moment in time.”
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
RSS