Brisbane’s summer air is hazy and thick with humidity, while winter brings crisp blue skies.
Light travels differently through air of varying densities, subtly affecting how we see our surroundings. Sometimes this is visible, such as the ripples we see floating above a hot road. Sometimes our eyes don’t catch these details, but tools like mirrors allow us to see the ‘echoes’ of light in the air around us.
Kinly Grey’s work uses the principle of schlieren imaging to see the heat that radiates from our skin, and our breath being expelled and swirling around us. Echoes provides a physical and individual experience of light, heat and humidity that looks beyond the one-dimensional depictions of sunlight often used to represent Brisbane. As you become part of the artwork, Kinly asks you to ponder how intimately linked to this environment you are:
I’d like you to consider, in a more poetic sense, how you might be ‘touching’ the world around you. How your being might emanate from you, in ways you perhaps underestimate. This is not necessarily to interpret your presence as threatening to the world, or those around you, but rather just to consider the possibilities of your interaction and influence. If the heat off your skin changes the path of light, can you see how the visible world bends around you? Light bouncing off a mirror is an echo, light traveling through air prints its path. This is the image of your echoes in the world.
City in the Sun artwork credits
echoes 2021
Installation with LED light, parabolic mirror, camcorder, screen
Courtesy the artist
