In 16 large photographs, Luc Demers’ Darkened Rooms explores photography’s relationship to light and an underappreciated darkness. The pictures are of dark, empty rooms with what light there is leaking in from behind shuttered windows and doors ajar, creating the brooding atmosphere of a horror movie. A few stand out as almost minimalist compositions combining simple geometry with an inky black background.
“Back Door,” by Luc Demers.
Much of their eerie beauty is in the artificiality of the light. In “Bedroom,” a window looking out on a bright day provides little light to a dark room. A translucent blind deadens the light coming in, and objects in the room can barely be discerned. “Night Light” and “South Window” seem to embrace the purity of darkness, as well as that of light. Dark blinds are backlit, framed by the stark white of windowsills. Divorced from context and grounding, the rectangles float in an abyss of deepening black.
For Demers, light operates both as illuminator of objects and as the original color of photographic paper. It’s the light portions of paper that remain unchanged during the developing process. Likewise, an inkjet printer sprays ink in areas designated as shadow to create an image of a three-dimensional object. In Darkened Rooms, Demers attempts to rethink the notion of photography as “the medium of light.”
Like many contemporary photographers, Demers is on an “exploration of absence.” The few rooms that we see are in passing, and devoid of bodies and human interaction. Almost a joke on the “shut-in artist,” light is kept out, behind pulled blinds and nearly shut doors, utilized best as an abstraction and a subtle suggestion of its potency and photographic importance.
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Through Nov. 27, Coleman Burke Gallery, 636 W. 28th St., 917-677-7825.
