Coleman Burke Gallery is pleased to present Darkened Rooms, a solo exhibition featuring new photographs by Luc Demers, which reinterprets the tension between light and dark.

Darkened Rooms pulls its viewer into an internal exploration of space, memory, absence and perception. Luc Demers’ acute control and selective use of light commands the intended ambiguity of space, abstraction framing the familiar. The bright, forthright light fissures capture the eye, while the works’ predominantly dark backgrounds imbue his images with a narrative potency. Before exhibiting work at the Coleman Burke Gallery this fall, Demers has exhibited at the Saco Museum, in the show, Image in Print, at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, in an exhibit entitled, Captured. Additionally, this past August, Demers displayed his work at Chelsea’s Cynthia-Reeves Gallery in Sense of Place.

Demers is committed to creating an engaging narrative by way of the environments portrayed in his photos. His photographs depict unlit rooms with either light seeping through the translucence of drapery or illumination beaming through an opened door. They emphasize a hallway or a staircase as a foreground for something more than what actually appears. These passageways, void of people, urge the viewer to imagine someone else potentially inhabiting the space. Some photos are abstract renderings portraying only what the light and the darkness in his composition allows. The light’s intensity, a contrasting brilliance, permeates through or abruptly against the darkness. It makes a statement the viewer can individually interpret and instantaneously feel. As light penetrates the “absence” that Demers explores, it conveys a profound realm. It arouses the imagination to leap beyond the literal to another level of understanding. Demers explains, “If darkness is the void of light, it is also the void of knowledge, of knowing.“