Between the seen and unseen: 'Mirage' invites you to question reality
Melbourne / Australia
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Melbourne / Australia 〰️
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
TL;DR: Aaron Christopher Rees has a new exhibition at Linden New Art.
So what? Step into Mirage and experience a world where red light transforms your perception, inviting you to rethink your relationship with the world around you.
Artist Aaron Christopher Rees was always drawn to the edges of imagination. “You could say art was the only thing that ever really interested me— be it music, cinema, literature, or visual art,” he says.
As a child he didn’t have the language to articulate it, but part of him “intrinsically understood that art making is a form of manifesting an altered reality or expression of thoughts” which gives humans an avenue to think through philosophical ideas.
Aaron’s latest exhibition Mirage at Linden New Art is a reflection of this journey, offering a unique window into how we experience and interpret the world around us—and inviting us to a space where the lines between the seen and unseen blur.
NV: Can you remember your first experiences using digital technology as we’ve come to talk about it today?
ACR: If you mean strictly digital it would probably be the computers in primary school. We’re talking early 90’s, running commands on Disc Operating Systems (DOS), loading multiple floppy-disk drives just to boot a very basic 2D program.
I think that was all very good for the brain—now it’s all about interface design, and most people will never really understand the ghost in the machine. I was secretly obsessed with computers and gaming right up until finishing high school.
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: How do you see the intersection of technology and physical art-making evolving?
ACR: I’ve long thought that Augmented Reality (AR) is the most interesting technology, and has the most practical applications because it’s low intervention in adding a layer to the world, or access to stacks that overlay. Good AR will not remove you from the world, rather it will integrate. In many ways, smartphones already do this—and by extension we are already cyborgs really—so I’m not racing out to fit into any goggles just yet, but the time is close.
NV: I want to talk about Mirage, your exhibition at Linden New Art. How does Mirage explore what you’ve called “phenomenological experience of seeing”?
ACR: Mirage, and the project before it Firmament which was shown at NAP Contemporary, could be viewed as a collected works. I conceived of them over the past four years, with the idea to draw a through line in the form of an exhibition, with some remixing of the works from exhibition to exhibition.
What I mean by the “phenomenological experience of seeing,” is the experience of being consciously aware of your own vision, and vision system. It is the lived experience of seeing from your own perspective. While that might sound incredibly basic, it’s one of those things that we really take for granted.
Firmament, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: You’ve explored the concept of it in other works too haven’t you?
ACR: I’ve skirted this territory in different ways for many years. In works like Telechiric loop, I linked First Person View (FPV) goggles up to a drone, which I tried to use as a navigational tool enacting a 3rd person perspectiv. Then in Tenome: Eyes of the hand I put the wearers vision quite literally into their own hands. Those artworks aimed to disrupt the viewers’ normal sense of vision and being in the world, and hopefully through doing so—opening up a space for reflection.
Mirage differs greatly in tone to those previous works which were aesthetically more ‘techno,’ and experienced individually. Mirage is more personal for myself, and aims to be a shared experience for the viewers, which is also reflected in two narrative video works that are part of the exhibition.
NV: Mirage immerses people at the exhibition in a red light spectrum. Why red?
ACR: I use photographic Panavision gels to create the red, and I chose this filter because it cuts out 100% of the blue and green spectrum of light, with only a fraction of yellow, orange, and red being visible.
Red has a particularly interesting effect on the eye as it doesn’t interfere with the eye’s ability to see in the dark. That’s why most LED’s in bedside lamps, plane cockpits and car dashboards are red.
In turn blue is at the other end of the spectrum for human vision. In a sense, blue wakes the eye up, whereas I think of red as being associated with night and dusk. This is exactly what the function of “night shift,” is on your phone—to stop the blue light from keeping you awake.
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: That explains my 7pm to 7am night-shift ritual then. Why do you think red and blue light spectrums have that effect on us?
ACR: My speculation is that our eyes evolved to adjust to the red spectrum at dawn, by campfire, or the setting sun, which alLowelld us to scan the horizon for predators and see silhouettes moving in the shadows.
Naturally, being immersed in red is going to have a biological effect on the body—it tricks us into adjusting, or moving into the evening. You will notice when you become immersed in total red, after a few minutes your eye and brain will slowly tone it down to auburn orange. I believe this is the eye trying to “White’s effect,” to some extent, which is interesting to me.
NV: And how does that play out in Mirage?
ACR: If you look out into the adjacent room, the room that once looked white or neutral now appears incredibly blue or green—the white light looks blue in contrast to the red.
In Mirage you can monitor your vision changing. If you immerse yourself in red, then walk into the non-red room whilst looking at the wall, you will notice the blue or green colour slowly drain and change to neutral cool or warm. This is what a camera is trying to do when it is set to ‘auto white balance. Because the spectrum of light is almost entirely red, looking outside through the windows of Mirage also makes the world appear black and white. This is a deliberate link to black and white photography, and the photographic darkroom, and some darkroom images I’ve created adorn the gallery’s walls.
Lastly the red is a link with the video projection on the second floor. One section of the video is a sun setting, filmed with a super long zoom lens in real time. The film technique makes the sun appear as if it’s an abstract object, dissolving into the horizon, and finally into black.
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: Are there any underlying themes you’re trying to convey to the viewer through Mirage?
ACR: There is an allegory for climate catastrophe here. It’s not explicit, but it is there. Some viewers have remarked on looking outside the windows of the gallery, saying it reminds them of when a fire storm is approaching. In many ways, this is the power of the sun—the creator of life on earth, and most probably the destroyer.
A sunset to me is a stereotypical photographic object, one of the most—if not the most—photographed scenes on earth. As an image it’s pretty pedestrian, yet when you really think about it, it is an incredible display of the rawest power in our solar system, and the reason we see at all.
NV: You’ve described the physical act of making art as meditative. Can you share how this meditative nature influences how you conceive of, and create your digital works?
ACR: It can be meditative! It’s also particularly frustrating working with digital technologies. They can be the most frustrating.
I find working in the darkroom meditative, mostly I think this is because performing repetitive physical actions in a low sensory environment is calming, however this is an analogue process. In the darkroom, my mind drifts and sometimes makes connections between information I have been absorbing—generally from books I’ve been reading, or images I’ve been thinking about.
That’s where the digital comes in—as much of that thought during an analog process, results in digital videos.
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: Your work raises questions about the idealisation of sight and the construction of ourselves as expert observers. Can you tell me more about this? Why is it important to you to explore?
ACR: Sight is generally the most privileged of all senses, it sits atop the pyramid of evidence and information gathering, and historically we have been through certain periods in which this has been called to question. In the context of Mirage, this primarily relates to one of the works on the ground floor—a small two channel video.
The video text tells a short story about the 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell who spent a large portion of his life mapping what he believed to be canals on Mars. Lowell wrote several books on the subject. He speculated that Mars had once supported life, and that these canals were proof of it. It appeared to him that long ago the canals had become barren, which he attributed to a climate catastrophe.
It turns out there were no canals on Mars. Lowell was, most probably, mapping his own optic nerve. The white blood cells and floaters, among other entopic phenomena, occurring within his own eye. Lowell was incredibly stubborn, which comes across in his many letters to fellow astronomers in which they refuted each other’s findings.
Mechanical objectivity was still a thing in the 1800’s, and there was this idea that the apparatus was infallible—which is a good fable for all technological advancements. Mixed with this, Lowell asserted that he had keener powers of observation and created a narrative around himself as being the ideal witness with his powerful telescope, ironically it was a most likely a particular feature of his telescope, which was causing light to refract back into his macular. Added to that, Martian fever was in the air, as the relatively new genre of sci-fi was taking off—it was considered very possible that alien life may just be a few planets away.
This story linked many parts of the exhibition very succinctly, including how I came to discover floaters in my eye as a child. I also like the notion that when we look as far away as possible, our eyes focus to infinity causing us to see our own eye floaters, which happens to be the vitreous humor breaking down within our eye over the course or our lives. You could say we are seeing our own biological constellations that mark our passage towards death.
Mostly I think Lowell’s story is about getting carried away with your own ‘vision’—which very much applies to the field of new technologies.
Mirage, Aaron Christopher Rees. Image: Aaron Christopher Rees
NV: Anything else you’d like to tell us?
ACR: I think the cult of technology is worth thinking about. Maybe it was always this way, but I have noticed in the past 5 years a shift in the way certain technologies are talked about like NFT’S, crypto, even artificial intelligence to an extent.
They’re talked about in a feverish way as if they are vital, and inevitable even if no one really trusts them or wants them—or even if they have garbage use cases at present. Just because something is new, does not mean it good or even necessary. We should be asking—how does it extend us and for what purpose?
Mirage is open at Linden New Art until 19 May.
