Luminous Matter Catalogue

Luminous Matter

Cover Image: Kate Joyce, Untitled #16 (one equilateral, one wedge), 2024

Luminous Matter December 12, 2025 - February 28, 2026

Co-curated by Luftwerk

Andrew Bearnot Larry Bell James Collins Shingo Francis Kate Joyce Jan Tichy Ruth Root Kim Uchiyama Salon installation by

Yuge Zhou

Introduction by Britton Bertran

Introduction

by Britton Bertran

Image: Detail of Larry Bell, SMSW, 1992 On reverse: Shingo Francis, Some Evenings Are Bright, 2023

Luminous Matter “Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.” - Goethe

SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to present the salon invitational exhibition Luminous Matter.

Luminous Matter brings together a group of eight artists that formally and conceptually explore the interconnectedness of color, light, and form. The exhibition was curated with the assistance of gallery artists’ Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero). Luminous Matter is presented concurrently with Luftwerk’s debut solo exhibition at SECRIST | BEACH, The Sun Standing Still.

Luminous Matter is an exhibition that examines the interdependent and generative relationship between three elemental constituents of visual experience: color, light, and form. Each, in isolation, holds an autonomous aesthetic and conceptual presence; yet, in their convergence, they produce the perceptual and emotional conditions through which we apprehend the world.

This exhibition proposes that the meeting point of these three tropes — their overlaps, tensions, and dissolutions — can offer a renewed lens through which to consider the nature of perception itself.

While color, light, and form have historically served as fundamental building blocks of visual art, they also occupy complex theoretical terrain. Goethe’s assertion that “colours are the deeds and sufferings of light” provides an entry point into this dialogue: color emerges not merely as a surface attribute, but as an event — a manifestation of interaction, time, and transformation.

Light, meanwhile, becomes both a material and a metaphor, shaping visibility and revealing the interstitial boundaries between presence and absence. Form, often regarded as static or structural, is here treated as fluid and responsive, contingent upon the oscillations of both light and color.

In this exhibition, these three forces are explored not as fixed categories but as active agents of experience. They are seen as participants in an ongoing exchange between the physical and the psychological, the empirical and the affective. The works assembled for Luminous Matter engage with this exchange through a range of media — from painting and installation to light-based and spatial practices — each probing how visual phenomena can evoke states of emotion, cognition, and embodied perception. In an era saturated by digital imagery and artificial illumination, this exhibition returns to the primal forces of color, light, and form — not as mere formal devices, but as conduits of human experience, capable of evoking wonder, reflection, and the quiet rediscovery of seeing itself.

Jan Tichy Across mediums, Jan Tichy creates environments where he manipulates the degrees to which things can be seen, and how they are seen, questioning the concept of visibility — both physical and social. For Tichy’s socially and politically engaged work, light reveals or conceals, invoking the notion of fidelity in representation.

In Tichy’s installation American Nature (after Nauman), three shapes made of neon tubing are connected to police scanners, each connected to three different areas of Chicagoland. Dispatcher and police activity over the set radio frequencies prompt the neon to light up. When illuminated, “here” and “there” are yoked together, a tether to the civic experience.

American Nature (after Nauman), 2017 White neon tubing, customized software, radio scanner Three pieces; 72 x 72 x 3 inches (square), 72 (diameter) x 3 inches (circle), 71 x 83 x 3 inches (triange) Edition of 3

Shingo Francis In Shingo Francis’ work, a confluence of light and color create boundaries, at times shapes, and at others shifts in perception. Within abstract forms, gradating color and elusive separations point to the Californian vistas that influence the artist.

Francis creates geometric compositions that depend on the viewer’s perceptual engagement to fully emerge. Through a specialized process, he develops light-refracting paint using finely ground mica. As the viewer moves back and forth, and up and down, the paintings’ iridescence evokes the temporality of the changing sky. This optical activation places the viewer at the center, making perception itself the enabling force of the work.

Some Evenings Are Bright, 2023 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches

Future is Bright, 2023 Oil on canvas 64 x 64 inches

James Collins For James Collins, the maxim “process is content” stands as a critical focus of his abstraction. Using the makeup of oil and acrylic — particularly their dissonance — in Collins’ work, the material operates almost independently of the artist’s choice, and the resulting forms are uncannily familiar to the viewer. Color and tone are able to achieve a mimicry of landforms, root systems, and canyons through abstract canvases.

Within the conjured forms of these two paintings, energy flows in organic waves across the canvas. What at first seem to be impasses later reveal themselves to be much more nuanced: while some diagonal sweeps divert the later movement, others are rendered inoperative. At this contradiction, only material holds the truth.

Untitled, 2025 Oil and acrylic on linen 60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2025 Oil and acrylic on linen 60 x 48 inches

Larry Bell Beginning with painting, Larry Bell’s practice has evolved into an investigation of light’s refraction and projection on surfaces, using panes of glass, mirrors, and thin films. Bell experimented early with industrial materials and processes, eventually developing a technique to deposit thin films atop glass that provoke unexpected encounters with light, seeming to capture and absorb it.

In SMSW, a microscopically thin vapor-deposited film of metallic oxides is laid onto material through a vacuum-coating process, then cut, lifted, and re-layered by hand to disrupt the grid. The vapor drawings express, perhaps more curiously than Bell’s glass sculptures, an exploration of surface, where technology and the artist’s hand are entwined as as the creating entity.

SMSW, 1992 Vapor drawing on canvas 30 x 30 inches

Andrew Bearnot Andrew Bearnot’s material-focused practice is interested in properties that invoke spectrums, where light and color’s interaction represent sacred moments of queer phenomenology. As their hand-blown and cast glass contains additive color and interacts with ambient light and projections, the artist thinks deeply about calibration. In their work, how material orients is a discussion also of how one orients to material.

Calibration Matrix is an installation of hand-blown glass works on two large plinths, with a gridded surface overlaid on the structures. Environment is inherently part of the work—and questions of perceptual truth, even—where the pattern’s distortion through the glass can only be seen from the viewer’s own positioning.

Uncertain Model II, a floor sculpture, consists of two interlocking planes and ellipsoidal voids. The piece thematizes uncertainty, where depth and flatness are placed at odds.

Twilight Vortex, 2025 Glass 2.25 x 13.25 x 13.25 inches

Cyan Tablet, 2025 Glass 0.5 x 7.25 x 5.75 inches

Cyan Sequence Glass 0.75 x 5.5 x 5.25 inches

Cyan Core, 2025 Glass 19.25 x 3.25 x 3.25 inches

Cyan Unduloid, 2025 Glass 22.25 x 4 x 4 inches

Cyan Helicoid II, 2022 Glass 14 x 4 x 4 inches

Twilight Cylinder I, 2025 Glass 17 x 2.75 x 2.75 inches

Twilight Cylinder II, 2025 Glass 14.75 x 2.75 x 2.75 inches

Cyan Helicoid I, 2022 Glass 18.5 x 3 x 3 inches

Sky Slab, 2018 Glass 0.5 x 26.5 x 8.25 inches

Uncertain Model, 2019 Polycarbonate 47 x 40 x 40 inches

Kate Joyce With an attentiveness to the geometry of light and space, Kate Joyce captures liminal states of intrigue, suspension, and clarity through photography, text, and installations. With a background in photojournalism, Joyce’s mediums, particularly photography, provoke a relationality between viewer and subject, the latter exploring the passage of time, movement, and migration.

Joyce photographs glass and acrylic prisms in her Space Craft series, with light misleading, illuminating, and disguising the true form. Used in telescopes, for one, these geometric objects focus the act of looking to see more precisely than the human eye. When operated in the series’ context, however, the form is, in fact, studied itself. Where they also bear resemblance to architecture, Space Craft ruminates on perception as we move through the built world.

Untitled #2 (two equilateral), 2024 Archival pigment print 40 x 26.5 inches 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches, framed Edition 1 of 3

Untitled #11 (one isosceles, one wedge), 2024 Archival pigment print 26.5 x 40 inches 27.5 x 41 x 2 inches, framed Edition 1 of 3

Untitled #16 (one equilateral, one wedge), 2024 Archival pigment print 40 x 26.5 inches 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches, framed Edition 1 of 3

Untitled #9 (one wedge, one isosceles), 2024 Archival pigment print 26.5 x 40 inches 27.5 x 41 x 2 inches, framed Edition 2 of 3

Untitled #12 (one equilateral), 2024 Archival pigment print 40 x 26.5 inches 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches, framed Edition 1 of 3

Untitled #1 (two equilateral, one cube), 2024 Archival pigment print 26.5 x 40 inches 27.5 x 41 x 2 inches, framed Edition 2 of 3

Untitled #20 (one isosceles, one wedge), 2024 Archival pigment print 40 x 26.5 inches 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches, framed Edition 1 of 3

Kim Uchiyama Kim Uchiyama’s forms are influenced by ancient architecture. For Uchiyama, color is a source of light, and variability in hue develops an atmosphere among a decidedly flat canvas. A principal concern of the artist is an equitable surface, where no element is held with higher regard than another.

In the three paintings for Luminous Matter, while the columnar forms adopt a direct, objective style, wavering not one bit against the eye’s gaze, the negative space holds subtle differences in color. In the visible brushstrokes, the neutrality found in the blocks of color is disproven, and associations, illusions, and possibilities seep through. It is in this balance that Uchiyama affords her paintings an internal dialogue.

Arcade, 2023 Oil on linen 66 x 72 inches

Equinox, 2023 Oil on linen 66 x 72 inches

Portico 4, 2023 Oil on linen 66 x 72 inches

Ruth Root Ruth Root fuses hard-edge abstraction with cultural relevance. Irregular canvases exploring color, line, and form couple with custom printed fabrics of found imagery. Pulled from media, news, and search engines, the motifs are oriented into patterns evocative of pixillation in the digital age Untitled starts a dialogue between semiotic patterns and abstract expressionist movements, in the middle of which is a question towards shape, outline, and dimension. As a grounding element for the themes at play in Luminous Matter, Root’s shaped canvas is a critical and intriguing work.

Untitled, 2025 Digitally printed fabric Acrylic and spray paint on Sintra Board 53 x 33 inches

OPTION 2

当⽇之东遇⻅夜之西

when the East of the day meets the West of the night Salon Installation by Yuge Zhou

Yuge Zhou is an experimental video artist and filmmaker. Her work explores themes of migration, difference, and displacement, and the visual composition of them further reinforce these modalities.

Exploring places that change in relation to human behavior, nationality, and political difference, she imbues these ordinary spaces with a consequence of lived realities. when the East of the day meets the West of the night places two recordings of the setting and rising of the sun from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, seemingly reflecting one another. Zhou was raised in China but traveled to the US to study. The work explores her dual identity developed during the separation from her family, particularly under Covid travel bans when she was unable to return to China. The piece balances presence and absence, drawing both into a liminal—and beautifully fragile—harmony of the ‘now.’

当⽇之东遇⻅夜之西 / when the East of the day meets the West of the night , 2020

14 minutes and 6 seconds, with sound Sound design: Kikù Hibino; Cello solo: Ping Huo; Videography: Dylan Jordee & Xiong Lei Edition of 5 with 2 APs

We would like to thank artists Andrew Bearnot, Larry Bell, James Collins, Shingo Francis, Kate Joyce, Ruth Root, Jan Tichy, and Kim Uchiyama, and Peter Blum Gallery and William Turner Gallery for their participation in this exhibition.

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