Scott Lyall “Superstar”

Miguel Abreu Gallery (88 Eldridge St.)

This event has ended.

Color is hallucinations of skin.
—Empedocles

Miguel Abreu Gallery presents Superstar, Scott Lyall’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Drawing on a variety of recent work, Lyall continues to investigate links between technologies of the image and aesthetic experience.

Among the works included in the current exhibition are jewel-like pictures made with Nanomedia. Wafer-thin foils of cloned aluminum are altered at the level of their sub-visible particles, rendering structures that cannot be seen. But like certain plants and butterfly wings, these structures cause light to disperse and scatter. Whenever light encounters this exposed material, it shatters into billions of chromatic signals. The color is not derived from pigments or chemicals; it is the real-time appearance of the radiating light as it is scattered by the non-visible structures of the foil. This could be conceived as a performance by light. The scripts for such performances are made in a Clean Lab, but the works themselves are concrete, individual visibilities, or accidental masks of natural light. Crucially, as a structured material identity, the cloned foil is altered to become something new. To alter the informational structure of a substance is to give it the novelty of a changed identity. This is fabricated individualization. Taken as a group, the individuals make societies, groups of things inhabiting the province of our eye that offer support for observing and conceptualizing ideas about sameness, virtuality, and scale.