Madrid, Christina Seely: Lux

Dates: January 14 – June 18, 2010
Location: North Light Court, San Francisco City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, San Francisco, CA 94102
Hours: Monday – Friday, 8am – 8pm, Free

An exhibition of large-scale photographic banners representing LUX: an extensive artist project about both the beauty of manmade light, and the impacts of resource overconsumption.

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is very pleased to present Lux, an exhibition of large-scale photographic banners by San Francisco-based artist Christina Seely as part of our ongoing Art at City Hall program. This banner installation in City Hall’s North Light Court features portraits of cities within the most brightly illuminated regions on NASA’s map of the Earth at night. Seely’s beautiful and haunting images bring to the fore issues related to light pollution and the overconsumption of resources.

Engaged in both art and environmental circles, Seely employs her Lux series to portray the tension created by human dominance over the planet. The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery wishes to create a platform for this visual eco-conversation, utilizing Lux as the impetus from which to engage the City in a public dialogue around global warming and energy consumption.

“In a time when it is argued that no aspect of nature is unaffected by human impact, my work reflects on a lifestyle that fosters an intense need to dominate and control nature while existing in an increasingly delicate balance with it’s resources and rhythms. I am interested in the dialectic between the surface documentation of a photograph and the complex reality that lies beyond that surface – how beauty can suggest the simple and ideal while both subtly reflecting and obscuring an often darker more complicated truth.”
– Christina Seely

More About Christina Seely
Seely is also a founding member of the design collective Civil Twilight, creators of Lunar Resonant Streetlights an innovative system of lighting that respond to moonlight, dimming and brightening each month as the moon cycles through its phases. These lights  reduce unnecessary light pollution, allowing city dweller better visual access to the night sky, and use up to 90% less energy than conventional outdoor lighting.  To learn more about Civil Twilight, please visit, www.civiltwlightcollective.com