JON CAMPBELL, BILL CULBERT, NELL, TOM POLO, CHUNXIAO QU

Borrowing its title from the Velvet Underground’s 1968 album White Light/White Heat, the exhibition similarly hinges on a kind of double meaning. At first encounter, the works register as intense, and the viewer is immediately bathed in a persistent clinical-like light, producing a sense of unease. As the exhibition unfolds, this intensity softens, revealing something more temporary, fragile and contemplative. In a 1969 radio interview, Lou Reed spoke of his interest in metaphysical studies and a Japanese healing practice involving the emission of “white light”, exploring the fundamental nature of reality, existence and being.

Even as the works remain implicated within systems of display and exchange, their familiar glow now becomes estranged, drained of colour and certainty, producing a mood that is both unsettling and seductive. Here, the works occupy a liminal space, suspended between light and dark, birth and death, stagnation and renewal, permanence and temporality.