Craig Dorety | Continuum

Continuum is a new body of sculptural light pieces by Oakland-born artist Craig Dorety. Continuum runs in the side gallery concurrently with Origin Stories: Alexi Antoniadis + Susie Taylor. An artist reception is on First Friday, September 2, 5-8pm. 

Craig Dorety explores our ever-shifting relationship to the properties of light, crafting time-based tracings of various imagery. Inspired by Johannes Itten’s writing, Josef Albers’ painting, and Isaac Newton’s research, Dorety’s sculptures are color-theory-in-action: exploring the ethereal properties of light, shadow, and time by providing them physicality and weight. The abstract works warp the viewer’s perspective as hues morph atop shapes within shapes, using electronics and animated light to mirror the shape-shifting illusions natural light provides every day.

In a time when technology so often distracts and displaces, Craig Dorety’s work uses pixels, LEDs, digital images and filters to stimulate focused reverie. In Continuum, Dorety’s meditative sculptures use vibrant, animated gradients of light to extract movement from static images of sunsets, flowers and other natural phenomena. He expands on the particularities of these subjects by way of their sculptural shapes, bringing the viewer face-to-face with the limitations of perception. Through its creation of illusory depths, the work is often hypnotic, suspending the senses between voids in surfaces while employing minimal forms to achieve maximum effects.

“Everything changes over time. Even an oil painting slowly changes: colors fade, paint dries and develops cracks, the canvas embrittles or shrinks or warps. I like to experiment with time in a more immediate sense. I take static photographs — which are captured moments in time from a specific perspective — and stretch them into the fourth dimension. In essence, I use microcontrollers and code in a series of abstractions to turn space into time. Conceptually, this re-animates that captured moment-perspective, but in a highly abstracted way.”