One of art's leading lights

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

SHINING EXAMPLE: Anthony McCall projects light through a gas, making solid-appearing and changing shapes.

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THE BOYS FROM VENEZUELA: Los Amigos Invisibles, from left, Juan M Roura, Julio Briceno, Maurigo Arcas, Armando Figueredo, and Jose R Torres.

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Artist Anthony McCall does not make light of art; he makes art out of light.

Adam Art Gallery exhibition Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light is the first time New Zealand audiences can experience the New York artist's solid light shows.

As the gallery's part of the International Arts Festival, the gallery wanted to put on a major show of an international artist, curator and gallery director Tina Barton said.

McCall was the centre of considerable international attention and was the biggest-name artist to have a solo show at the Adam gallery, she said.

"It's quite a big deal to have an artist of that calibre here."

McCall's large-scale works at the Adam gallery involve light projected through a dry ice-like gas in a dark room, creating solid-appearing and changing shapes.

Wellington photography student Joe Hambleton, at the exhibition yesterday, said the effect was "pretty cool".

"First of all I didn't know it was light but as soon as you stand in front of the light you get the full effect of what's going on.

"You don't want to leave the light capsule you get into."

McCall began his career in the 1970s, making experimental films and performance works using elements such as fire, light, and smoke.

He was an active figure in the experimental art and film scenes in London and New York, but stopped producing art in the late 1970s.

He returned to art only recently.

Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light runs at the Adam Art Gallery, on Victoria University's Thorndon Campus, until April 25. The gallery is open from 11am to 5pm each day except Monday. There will also be a showing of McCall's first solid light film, Line Describing a Cone, from 1973, in the Wellington Town Hall at 7pm on Monday.

- © Fairfax NZ News