Sunlighting, Daylighting, Moonlighting

At first glance these terms call up the essential cycles of the natural world. The passing of a day, the turning of a season, the rising of the stars on the horizon line. Expanding on this, each of these terms has also come to be closely related to transformation within our constructed life: your vocation becoming your primary source of income; revealing the true nature of an urban context by exposing waterways covered over; the need to split yourself (day job, night job, etc.) in order to navigate the complexities of running a life.

Sunlighting, Daylighting, Moonlighting

These terms are all, therefore, deeply connected to processes of navigating the systems and structures of the world we inhabit and the politics that constitutes it. This exhibition presents the work of artists who each scrutinise these politics—honing in on the fields of learning environments, individualism, and online domains—in order to build worlds. This scrutiny, carried out through practice, produces generative forms of friction that play out in the form of sculpture, video, collage, print, and sound.

The work of Prairie Hatchard-McGill deforms codices used in learning environments in order to highlight the border between pedagogical frameworks and the incorporation of a subject to enhance a certain type of society. Hulita Koloi excavates the tension between the individual and the collective: what has been the price of the evolution of cities in late Capitalism where the needs of our bodies and environs are largely ignored? Meanwhile, Angela Pan introduces us to a complex figure carved from the cryonic-like environments of online worlds. Testing the limits and formats of the realm of artificiality, this figure performatively stretches understandings of self-care and self-love.

This impulse to ‘cast light on’ is not so much to show us “what we don’t know” but rather to pointedly insist that we consider precisely what we do know, but may have ignored. Here, standard processes are revealed as arbitrary and ripe for charged deconstruction and reinterpretation. Viewed in concert, these works present an emerging form of social-sculpture that asks: where does my body belong?

Sunlighting is the first iteration of the New Commissions programme, evolving out of the legacy of the annual New Artists show and generously supported by the Chartwell Trust and Stout Trust.

Our programme 2023

This year we explore the question “where does my body belong?” To have a body is a pre-existing condition we all live with and in, and spend our lives coming to know what this could mean. While we are all born with a body, each body comes with its own unique capacity and limitations. The whether or how these capacities and limits unfold is greatly determined by the society into which we emerge. We consider the vast range of what it is to have a body, be a body, and participate within the systems that enlarge or confine us in the dynamic friction of our daily life.