Waddell’s FHI exhibition contemplates use of light

Local artist Stacy Lynn Waddell’s new exhibition UltraSuper—part of the Franklin Humanities Institute’s year-long exhibition series of African American, Caribbean and Diaspora arts—is a dynamic environment of sound, light and space. She makes excellent use of FHI’s small gallery space to explore the relation of social identities in postmodern, post-everything American society.

The artist squeezes three podium-mounted slide-reel projectors into a pop-up photo studio shrouded in a dark mylar curtain. Not quite claustrophobic, the space is tight. Riddled with the erratic clicks of transition slides and switches of light, the installation creates an air of rhythmic tension as bursts of illumination come and go and abstract images flash on a screen.

The installation displays an apt formalism. Almost in a painterly manner, Waddell projects light into space, modeling the gallery through high-contrast streams of darkness and light. Our sense of environment and place emerges through these contrasting blasts of light. We feel space through whole-body sensations rather than visual perception.

The exhibition statement imbues UltraSuper with an identitarian charge, asking what is made visible and invisible through the manipulation of light. By conflating darkness and blackness, Waddell forces us to critically examine how light and ways of seeing create identities and spaces in American culture.

Crucially, UltraSuper explores blackness as a space of high contrast between light and dark. This hyperbolic gesture demands us to better understand our situation in the world by critically examining sensorial experiences. Space emerges through the contrast of senses in dynamic changes between dark and light, silent and loud. Yet these silences and darknesses are not empty but filled with meaning.

In our spectacular culture of blaring illumination and postmodern excess, Waddell’s exploration of darkness is about more than racial identity and relation. It is a call to explore the forgotten and hidden, the invisible and unfelt corners of the world which slip between the cracks. Waddell invites us to come into contact with the process of how the world is mediated and represented.

But an exercise in analysis and ekphrasis cannot quite do justice to this work. After all, there is no substitution for sensing—and not just seeing—the sensational.

UltraSuper is on display at the Franklin Humanities Institute in Smith Warehouse through April 15.