Light Waves is an exhibition of chromograms and sculptures that continue Natalja Kent’s material exploration of process, color, embodiment and the ocean.
Each piece in this series is an artifact of a physical experience had by the artist in the solitude of a pitch-black, dark, room – influenced by her time in the ocean. These experiences of expanded presence and consciousness, rooted in body scan meditation, cultivated by the artist over years of rigorous and diverse somatic study, bring Kent into deep collaboration with the ocean and light sensitive chromogenic paper. Light Waves combines the body’s wisdom, colored light, and feeling tones of the ocean’s movement and healing into embodied materiality. The chromograms that result are both elegant and uncanny. Playful shapes, color fields, and angles emerge and tangle across the richly layered surfaces. Echos of the ocean’s transmissions of healing and wellness transpire through the abstractions, hearkening back to her long hours spent in the ocean as a dedicated surfer and ocean activist.
In the lineage of the Process Art movement, Kent creates performance constraints for her chromograms. Each piece is a collaboration between her, the chromogenic paper, light, embodied meditation, and the ocean. The process involves going into a pitch-black dark room, doing a body scan meditation, placing light sensitive paper onto a table, and then holding a state of embodied movement meditation. Influenced by the movements of the ocean she then dances around the room with activating flashlights. As the lights fall throughout the room and onto the page in seemingly random ways, the light sensitive paper records all of the movements in the space. Once the movement meditation is complete the paper is then processed to no longer be light sensitive. The result is a unique, time based recording of an abstract and spontaneous embodied response to the transmissions received by the ocean. These unique works are titled with a process-specific name – Chromogram which is a conglomeration of the words chronos (time), chroma (color) and gram (recording/drawing). With this work, she insists upon her body, her energy, and the ocean—all in vibrant and intense color. All alive.
Natalja Kent lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally at Tate Liverpool (UK), Carpenter Center for The Visual Arts at Harvard (Boston), Pace Gallery New York (NY), The Berry Art Museum (VA), Hiromi Yoshi Gallery (Japan), The Museum of Museums (Seattle), PS1 and MOMA Queens (NY). In 2021, Kent. was an artist in residence at Google (Mountain View) and Camera Obscura (Santa Monica). Kent’s work has been reviewed or featured in WIRED, ArtNet, Voyage LA Magazine, and Manual/RISD Museum Publications.