Shifting Light

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When Laura Payne started graduate school in Baltimore a few years ago she painted portraits and made videos. She was hoping to bring those interests together somehow into a more coherent practice. Then, in her second year of studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, as she scanned photographs to refer to in her paintings, she became fascinated with the visual qualities of artificial light. Her painting practice shifted.

Payne, who has a solo show until May 1 at the Darrell Bell Gallery in Saskatoon, is probably most easily categorized now as part of a newly revitalized Op Art movement. In her paintings, she uses shaped panels and various colours to create the illusion of folds and bends. She also creates what she calls “gems” – smaller hexagonal paintings with more personality. “They’re experiments in digital design being interpreted into paint,” says Payne. “Some of them do rely again on the illusion of light, but there’s a lot of patterning.” She groups these pieces on the wall to create an animated interplay of colour and form.

And her video work?

That has shifted too. She now makes light boxes that emit hazy shifting light in rainbow hues. Each box features coloured lights under a diffusing screen so colours mix and blend. She affixes dichroic film atop the diffusing screen, which affects the way people perceive the light. “Depending on where you’re standing in the room, you actually see different colours through the surface,” she explains.

The colours also shift through time. “It’s about the speed of a sunset, so the movement is difficult to perceive,” says Payne. “Except that when people walk away from it and they look back, they realize instantly it’s changed since the last time they’ve seen it. People spend a long time in front of it. It seems very calming to people.”

Payne moved to Saskatoon with her husband, who is completing his doctorate there. She grew up in Caledonia, a small town near Hamilton, Ont., and did her undergraduate degree at Western in London, Ont. She has worked as an assistant at the Darrell Bell Gallery for two years. Bell has represented her art for about a year. This is her first solo show at the gallery.

Payne is interested in the formal qualities of simulated light and colour. “To me, there’s something unique that I’m trying to chase down about investigating abstract light.” But there’s also a psychological aspect. “People have this sublime, phenomenological kind of reaction to something like a sunset. I’m really interested in pulling out, extracting, that same kind of impulse, that same kind of reaction or intangible feeling from something they know is artificial.”

Darrell Bell Gallery

405-105 21 Street East, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 0B3

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