LIGHT NOW: Atong Atem, Diego Ramírez, Jason Sims, Meagan Streader

Light Now brings together four contemporary artists who are wielding light to reconfigure how we navigate space and the constructed world, featuring light works by Meagan Streader, Diego Ramirez, Jason Sims and Atong Atem.

‘Painting’ with light, Meagan Streader’s soft, refined palette redefines how we traditionally view light in space. Each of Streader’s site-responsive ‘brushstrokes’ of light re-orient the physical world and the viewer’s relationship to constructed space. As seen in NGV’s Melbourne Now, Streader’s work continues to garner interest from curators and collectors alike. Constantly pushing her practice, Streader’s new work transforms her gentle palette to a new, playful expression that is set to redefine light art.

Working across a range of mediums, Diego Ramirez uses light as parody to communicate the darkness, skepticism and catastrophe that defines his artistic practice. Ramirez playfully uses neon light and its reliance on electricity to draw sardonic parallels to his motif of the Vampire, dead yet living, feeding on blood.

Through the works of internationally exhibiting and renowned light artist, Jason Sims, we locate the hand of the artist in a contemporary practice that takes light back to the traditional techniques. Hand building, welding and installing his grand light works, Sims evokes the sublime to create illusion through light.

Shifting away from the lens, Atong Atem’s LED neon light works draw on her interdisciplinary postcolonial motif of the Banksia plant, speaking to the disjunct between the built and natural environments.

Light Now collates the practices of four artists who are skilfully using light to reorient experience, altering perceptions of the physical space to the broader world.