NEWS: Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art Reopening

Image: Fiona Crisp, Safe Haven (2010). Giclée print from colour transparency. Image courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London

Sunderland’s Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art reopens on Saturday 24^th March after an 18-month hiatus, providing a lavish new home for visual art displays in Sunderland. Having secured capital funding and relocated within the National Glass Centre, the gallery celebrates its reopening with an extensive photographic commission by artist Fiona Crisp.

Her new work, Material Sight, delves into the frontiers of scientific experimentation and can be viewed at the gallery from Saturday 24^th March until Sunday 13^th May. Material Sight engages with the complex nature of fundamental science, dealing with questions that are far removed from our everyday reality, it aims to strip back the abstract layer of cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics. Crisp displaces these fields from their sub-atomic worlds and expanded multiverses, reformulating them as visual representations that are within our grasp.

As a starting point, and in line with her practice-based research method, Crisp collaborated with three world-leading research facilities for two years to explore the invisible, often unfathomable, experiments flourishing in these secluded laboratories. Known for major installations of photographs that pursue the idea of ‘Negative Capability’, which acknowledges artists’ access to truth within a state of uncertainty, Material Sight continues to present the photographic subject as one of doubt and mystery.

Using scaffolding to support a combination of large-scale photography, video and sound, Crisp visually dissects investigations into the structure and history of the universe and represents them as physical spaces. Through science’s embodiment in these spaces, Material Sight aims to enhance all viewers’ understanding of the most complex scientific endeavours.