Brenda Taylor Gallery is pleased to announce Night Light: The Aesthetics of Time By Events in Space, John M. Carney’s first New York City solo show. This exhibition is comprised of nine silver gelatin photographic prints shot using time-lapse photography and hand-built, large format cameras.

Night Light is an exploration of the traces left on landscape by human and astronomical illumination. These images were made primarily in the American West, where the arid climate allows the prolonged film exposure to record the movement of the stars, moon, satellites, and aircraft across the night sky. The monumental landscape of the American West frames this celestial movement alongside the human-built environment of buildings, roads, and churches. As the title suggests, these images use the movement of people and the movement of nature to describe space and time. The artist selects a location to act as a stage, opens the shutter of his large format camera, and watches as the hour-long exposure captures evidence of events in space—cars, planes, satellites, stars, and moon—in the form of calligraphic marks of light. These light traces are the actors on the stage. They are evidence of our movement, past and present, within both our manmade and natural environment.

Night Light investigates who we are in time and space. The images challenge the viewer to consider that time, as commonly conceived, is a purely psychological construct, an illusion of the mind, a figment of our imaginations. In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking writes, “The psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future.” Real time, simply put, is merely another aspect of space, the fourth dimension. As Hawking says, “Imaginary time is really the real time,” and these photographs endeavor to depict this tricky reality—that space & time are one.

One cannot help but search these images for the familiar, pausing to scrutinize and decipher the unknown. The content in the pictures appear transparent—this is a road, the sky, a large rock formation—but the calligraphic light that moves dynamically across the space draws the viewer in and entices further study and speculation. This embodiment of the space through the recorded light movement allows the imagination to take over and transform the notion of the photograph from a record of fact into a stage wherein a dynamic play is unfolding.

All the work in this exhibition was made using large-format cameras, each of which were hand-built by the artist. The large black and white negative allows for great value gradation, clarity, and detail in the finished print. The artist hand-prints his images using traditional wet process printing techniques on fiber-based paper. The photographs are 18×22 inches and 26×34 inches.