SCHLEICHER/LANGE is pleased to present the solo exhibition Local Horizon by London-based artist Chris Cornish. Balancing along the line between real and virtual space, like a media archaeologist, Cornish works his way through the histories of computers, art, and technology to explore the perspectivization of the world (since Leon Battista Alberti). Carefully exploring the interstices occurring between seemingly incompatible media, Cornishʼs archaeology seeks to lift information, objects, and surroundings from virtual or historical sources, and transform them to ʻrealʼ space, recast as sculpture, photography, and film. Though technologically based, these works manage to maintain a poetic, almost painterly dialog. For this show, he has created entirely new works, all loosely associated with the concept of the ʻlocal horizonʼ, a term taken from astronomy, which posits that our view of the world, as well as the stars, depends on our standpoint. Each person has his or her own ʻpersonalʼ horizon. As the artist puts it, “I think this is why the concept of local horizon caught my imagination, the world according to a specific view, time and space rather than a shared perspective.” This singular, ʻpersonalʼ perspective Cornish explores through both the historical implications – the social and theoretical – as well as a very topical employment of cutting edge technology used to capture images and the information of a given environment.

The six ʻglobeʼ sculptures within the Horizons (2012) series (their production method makes use of traditional hand-made globe making techniques), at first seem to simply show a gradation of color. However, like many of Cornishʼs beautifully simplistic works, complexity unfolds on knowing more. Each ʻglobeʼ depicts the precise 360 degree lighting situation, in a specific moment, at a specific place—from the reflection of a blue mountain landscape in Utah, to the sky above a night time Tokyo, a darkness broken by the city lights. The complete three dimensional light information of each place is captured and ʻre-mappedʼ back onto a three dimensional sphere. They represent a totality in miniature, each one a personal world. When these precise light mappings are then placed in the real space of the gallery with its intense bright fluorescent light, the result is a dual echo between the captured lighting of the sculptures and that of the exhibition space.

The 16 mm film, What Follows (2012), depicts a viewing booth often used in graphic and product design to produce ʻperfectʼ lighting environments. The chamber of this box is calibrated to have a color temperature that is set accurately according to the level of daylight. As if placed before an artificial sky, a mysterious silhouette turns in a timeless space, at once a solid, as well as a shadow. Cornish explains that he was influenced by early engravings of descriptive geometry and depictions of shadows to explore ideas on the screen, projection, and perspectival space. Considering the film in formal terms, the work also can be linked to recent art history, for example, Larry Bellʼs cubes that experiment with light and space, as well as minimalist works, such as those of Dan Graham, from the 1970s.

Alongside the film and sculptural work, Cornish shows new photographs. The Logic of Being (2012) is a triptych whose construction is based on the recurring theme of a personal horizon. Each photograph is actually a panorama of photographs. The various directions of the camera only resolved through the use of target markers placed randomly on the paper backdrop. The resulting image—created entirely using technical aids—evokes a new universe, as the markings become points of navigation in visual space like a field of stars. Another new work Out of the Blue, Into the Black (2012), shows two photographs of the same image of soap bubbles. These delicate forms (mirroring the totality of a globe and the fragility of a precise moment in time) differ only in their technical fabrication – the polarized filters on the lights and lenses on the camera. One blocks the reflective light, the other lets it all shine through, creating a rainbow spectrum (and here, one can draw a reference to theories surrounding the refraction of light: all rainbows, as they are seen by one personʼs view through the juncture of water droplets and light can be said to be ʻpersonalʼ, local horizons). By the simple photographic procedure of polarized filters, the soap bubbles float either like ghosts through the dark, their contours only vaguely recognized, or spectacular planets of color.

Each of the works in the exhibition talk about space through the discourse of seeing and representation, of perspective theory, projection, and the apparatus involved. Using traditional techniques, like photography and globe making, as well as more contemporary technological methods, Cornish opens up a critical viewing of space: the real and the virtual overlap, often leaving the beholder surprised by the accurately produced effects,