Roos van Haaften presents the talk “Shadow Laboratory," a talk about the light works she will be making during her Bloomington residency in response to IU's Astronomy Glass Photographic Plate Collection, which includes glass negatives of stars, galaxies, and black holes.
A visual artist with a background in theater, van Haaften draws with reflections and shadows to create novel landscapes that often have a sinister or melancholic character. Her light installations move between the boundaries of sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Working with light and shadow connects closely with her affinity to theatrical principles, especially the deconstruction of the fourth wall in which the viewer is involved in both the illusion and technique. The work consists of found scrap material that gains new value as a tool to evoke an illusion. A pin becomes a lamppost and a broken bottle a prismatic sky. The work is fleeting and physically hardly there: when the lights are off, the image evaporates. It shows a glimpse, an allusion that is completed in the viewers’ mind. Van Haaften amazes us and misleads us into thinking that we can see something that is not actually there.
As well as working in her studio, Van Haaften prefers to work on site-specific projects inspired by location or place. During her residency at the Eskenazi School, the artist will create works inspired by the university collection’s glass negatives of stars, galaxies, and black holes. Some of the glass negatives are historically very valuable, yet visually one hardly sees anything: a transparent glass panel with a black dot, as if it were a fly on a white sheet of paper. Other negatives show instruments used at local observatories; interesting images that are about looking itself; a form of ‘mise en abyme.’ Van Haaften will explore these items as visual glimpses that trigger the viewer in an associative way.
