Light Forms

This publication delves into the manipulation of light, time and
material by Danish artist Emil Salto, on the occasion of Light Forms, his first solo museum show in the United States.

Salto’s light experiments trace the borderland of expanded
photography. Directed by his awareness that perception is an embodied act, Salto deliberately uses a blind process of image making in the darkroom. There, his body movements and light produce unforeseeable afterimages. Once released from that temporal lapse and the darkness of that setting, Salto extends his experiments with light and form to kinetic armatures, spatial environments and to the viewer.

Essays by Curator Cora Fisher and Robin Clark identify connections
between Emil Salto’s phenomenological, material sensibility and
historical lineages including the Bauhaus, Group Zero, and the
American Light and Space movement. Their texts also place his work in the wider context of contemporary light art, expanded photography and performativity.

Salto’s work allies itself with modernism’s perception-bending
formalism while it compels us to cultivate presence and attention,
bracing us against the speed of contemporary consciousness.

Emil Salto:Light Forms is produced by the Southeastern Center for
Contemporary Art (SECCA) in collaboration with Revolver.
Cora Fisher, Ed.