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Misha Bittleston: While Joy Was Sleeping
Storefront Installation of Enlarged Black & White Paintings
Phantom Galleries – January 15 to April 4 2004
The work in this store window exhibit is here thanks to the vision of the people of POPULUS Presents, San Jose's Art in Public Spaces program, known as Phantom Galleries. Be proud to live in a city where vacant commercial spaces are opened for to local artists to transform them into public art, and where art is not narrowly defined by what is boxed inside museums or galleries, but where art is created by the community and comes out to meet you from the walls and windows. To know that art is alive in San Jose, if you had any doubt, all you have to do is look around.
The work in this window starts as small ink paintings on paper, no larger than seventeen by twelve inches, which are scanned and enlarged. My preoccupation with light has caused me to abandon color, and paint with black ink. Because my work is achromatic it transfers nearly uncompromised in a greater variety of lighting contexts than if it where chromatic. In this case you are experiencing it through the filter of black lights, especially if you come back after midnight when the floods switch themselves off.
The world seems like a different place during the night than by daylight, in candle light than by fluorescent lighting. How visual art is experienced also varies based on the light that it is viewed in. Works in grayscale not only tell you about light by design but they also inform you about the light and color of the place in which they are displayed without losing their visual character. Works composed of color are at odds with the colors of their surroundings, being dependant on a specific range of color and lighting in the surrounding environment.
I came to the bay area nearly fifteen years ago, as an immigrant, and have been influenced and changed dramatically by this place and my experiences here, but I came as a painter and I am still painting today. I want my work to be flexible, so that it can be distorted and transformed by extremes of lighting, printing, and environment and survive with the capacity to communicate its original meaning and identity.
Misha Bittleston, 2004
Misha Bittleston: www.mishabittleston.com
POPULUS Presents: www.populuspresents.com
Phantom Galleries - Art in Public Spaces: 408-271-5151
Misha Bittleston: Phantom Galleries Installation Diagram
Click rectangles in the diagram below, to view the associated images.
- Title: While Joy Was Sleeping 1
Description: Enlarged ink painting
Size: 72 x 56 inches
- Title: While Joy Was Sleeping 2
Description: Vertically hanging triptych of enlarged ink paintings attached to white boxes
Size: 86 x 18 inches
- Title: While Joy Was Sleeping 3
Description: Vertically hanging triptych of enlarged ink paintings attached to white boxes
Size: 86 x 18 inches
- Title: While Joy Was Sleeping 4
Description: Vertically hanging triptych of enlarged ink paintings attached to white boxes
Size: 86 x 18 inches
- Title: While Joy Was Sleeping 5
Description: Enlarged ink painting
Size: 72 x 56 inches
Media: paper; foam board; fishing line; plastic piping; casein glue; ATG tape; fluorescent black lights.
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