Into the light
A text by Nick London

I'm stood, looking down at the back of my arms and hands. As I turn them over in the flat, amber glow, I consider the number of years it's been since I was last bathed in street lighting. Heady memories of nights long passed come surging through my mind, as if each were triggered by the incoming, sodium charged photons. Looking up from my reverie, I am faced with a poster-sized photograph, trapped behind a layer of Perspex, showing a shop front with the shutter’s half closed. I'm told that the picture was taken in the early morning, yet, under lights that prevent my eyes from rendering colour, the hour of day is hard to differentiate. Paper covers the glass doors of the store, obstructing a view of the interior. I ponder that the premises could be both open and closed, in day and night, existing, as it does before me, in a trapped, frozen state of duality. I don't know what became of this particular business, following its pandemic induced closure, so am forced to consider its fate - much like Schrödinger’s cat - as existing in all states of possibility.

I was in prison during the pandemic, and for some years before and after it. I never saw the empty, apocalyptic high street, deserted motorways, and two-metre gaps in supermarket checkout queues. Other than some additional restrictions, my days of lockdown proceeded much as they had done before. I am therefore struck by an overwhelming sense of being in a museum; amidst the preserved relics of a time and place that existed outside of my own reality. I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the Perspex, and for a moment become an actor in the scene. In this role I am a man out of time, installed in a history that was not my own, surrounded by the artefacts of a society to which I did not belong. It's possible that I'm being myopic, and the reality is that most people would feel the same about this particular moment in history. It could even be that, in those times, I was more a member of this society than I was at any other - all of us, being prisoners, of sorts, back then. Perhaps I am free to select either narrative, and that the freedom itself becomes salient in the choosing to hold multiple versions of reality in a suspended state.

Another piece shows two more images of closed shop premises. Here the light finds passage travelling along the surfaces, refracting down the thick edges and creating an impossible glow. The streetlights are enveloping the scene, a reminder that they have remained in the frame over decades of decline and renewal; steadfast in the civic function and metronomic timing, whilst all else beneath them staggers along to an erratic beat of the capitalist state. The images show a growing pile of letters - no doubt, bills, and court reminders - vying for position beyond the shop doors: unwanted news on a welcome mat. The rhythm may be erratic, but the obligatory beat pounds on and on.

In another image, the glass of a store front reflects closed premises opposite it, with an empty street between them. Once more I see my reflection, trapped in a space between the shops, and the road, and the poster, and the Perspex, and the impossible light. My thoughts shift to the view from my old cell window. Some mornings, when the sun was rising in a misty summer sky, the yellow and orange glow would merge with the fence line, itself lit by the same kind of sodium lights I now stand beneath. For a few moments the skylit steel would dissolve into the sunrise, and I, reflected in my window, would stand within and beyond the apparatus of my containment. Like the owners of those shop premises, I would exist beyond the knowledge of any certainty, my hopes for the future tethered to countless variables of the present: time’s weight and relevance felt, yet suspended, in this improbable moment; free from the grim solidity of reality set in stone.

The bills and demands from the shop floor are now cast in concrete before me.. The terror within those envelopes is now petrified, and the screaming demands within forever silenced. I think of all the dear John letters I've seen opened over the years, and wonder, had they been left unopened, would the relationship be both alive and dead? At what point is the future re-written? Here, for all posterity, hangs a moment of frozen eventualities: realities cast in a state of perpetual unknowns; a reprieve for hopes and dreams that would otherwise be shattered. In a final glance I note that the address window in one of the envelopes has been pressed as smooth as glass in the concrete rendering. I imagined that if I look hard enough I may see the recipients details, and from them I could know more: more of their plight; more of the society to which I must re-join; more of myself. I fight the futile urge to see what will remain forever occluded.

And then I move out, into the dizzying, technicolour daylight of the unknown.

______

Snail Mail Shells
A text by Ava Alvarez

Best known for creating artworks that fossilise found objects and for creating exhibitions that unveil a preoccupation with space, in James Lomax’s current exhibition A Tale of Two Cities at Sid Motion Gallery he has added in the ingredient of light. Specifically, he has installed low sodium vapour lamps which will be activated in the gallery as the sun begins to go down each day. Before being phased out in the early 2000s during a sustainability and efficiency push in the UK, these lamps were often used to illuminate the urban nighttime. In this presentation, the lights start out emitting a pink light then develop into a potent yellow amber glow that transforms the gallery space into a site of duplexity.

Vision is the perception and prediction of light. We create images when light enters our eyes and hits the back of our retina where photoreceptors of rods and cones make sense of depth and colour. Light then has a chemical reaction and converts into an electric signal that travels along the optic nerve and leaves the optic chiasm. Messages of encoded light then move onto higher cortical structures where past memories meet current predictions until, finally, our brain holds a stable idea of the image to report back to our accessible consciousness. Ergo, even if the subject matter remains constant, a change of light conditions can create different rendering of the same object.

The intense yellow glow of low sodium vapour lamps desaturates light so that colour rendering is lost. Filmmakers have leveraged the otherworldly quality initiated by the lamps to create gritty cities, amplify unease, and to portray surreal moods. In general, according to neuroaesthetics, when people are immersed in cooler light tones they feel more expansive in space whereas in warmer tones, like an amber glow, people feel the spatial depth is more compact. Through inducing a ganzfeld-esque light immersion, Lomax psychologically brings people in closer. In addition, the use of the lights brings people closer through a shared aesthetic experience.

An awareness of the ultimate curatorial interaction is at the core of Lomax’s practice. He consistently presents his work so that the viewer is guided back to an awareness of placehood. He asks what the lexicon of a city like London is, a city that is simultaneously innovative and dilapidated. At Sid Motion Gallery, Lomax maps out dual exhibitions that work in synchronicity to explain that we walk along streets where a copy of a Charles Dickens novel is cheaper than a meal deal. In Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, words are compiled to detail urban squalor. In Lomax’s A Tale of Two Cities, letters are compiled to detail urban closures.

The work is political by nature of the subject but is dealt with like syllables exist in a word, the undertones are a part of the composition but are not the statement itself. The photographs he presents of abandoned storefronts are echoed in the organically coloured casts - which Lomax sometimes refers to as ‘paintings’.

While reading these paintings, one is cognizant that they are looking at arrangements of envelopes. Specifically, unopened letters, which stamp on an inferential psychological weight of avoidance and communication gaps. Lomax became interested in the litter of letters on walks around town and when exploring shut down businesses.

The layered letter compositions in Letters (Hand Delivered) and Letters (The Respondent) are reminiscent of old country houses left to ruin or seaside villages whose facades have become cracked up by the sun. Although the sombre context is clear, the contemplative essence and serene quality of the artworks speak in a modernist vein like Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Maria Taniguchi, and other artists who are preoccupied with perception, materiality, and geometric simplicity - however Lomax’s materials present a weathered veneer. In the process of producing concrete casts the base layer picks up texture and relays it as tonal shifts. The imprint of the natural imperfections of the industrial materials cast are evident. This adds to the overall soothing aura of the concrete paintings.

In addition to starting to work with more colour and constructed compositions, in this new body of work we see a stylistic departure from Lomax’s typical found fabricated objects - a biotic being finds itself in a pink casting. A disposed rose, referenced in the photographic piece Closed, adds to the pastoral condition of the other concrete paintings. Reminiscent of the enchanted rose in the Beauty in the Beast, the flower hangs centred on the canvas, in a hazy place like a keeper of time.

The photographs are all undated and 1:1 life size, allowing people to step into the scene. Lomax is careful to compose scenes that are devoid of romance, yet still maintain an eerie artifactual beauty. Tying together the photographs fitted behind plexiglass and the paintings framed in aluminium, the gallery spaces are intersected with a hanging window display from a shop that went into liquidation. While all the works are cross referential and flow together in unison, the rendering of the abstractions and descriptions of city living conditions is contingent on the timing of when the visitor enters the gallery. Just as a city is experienced in multiplicity depending on the viewer and the moment of encounter, this exhibition is one of shifting perceptions.

James Lomax | A Tale of Two CitiesList of works

James Lomax | A Tale of Two Cities
List of works