Curated by
Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie
Lighting Design and Environment Concepts
Lucy Carter
Associate Lighting Designer
Sean Gleason
Graphic Design
Europa
Lucy collaborated closely with the Curators of this major exhibition at Somerset house on the overall design scheme for this exhibition that ran at Somerset house for 17 weeks in 2019/20. Based on the book, 24/7 by Jonathan Crary and exploring our over stimulated lives, that don’t allow for rest and our constant consumption of content via screens, and how our every interaction is tracked, mined and predicted and exploring the effects this has on our sleep and how even our sleep is being packaged as a useless and passive pastime.
The lighting design for the exhibition took the public through a 24 hour cycle of day to night, with each section having a distinct lighting environment created purely with artificial light. At first an electrified street at night, then a blue screen /moonlit night, into an industrial workspace environment, and finally out into an artificial dawn. An exploration of how lighting manipulates our lives every minute of the day.
Exhibition is not enough of a term for this fully immersive experience. Love it 24/7 was organized into five zones across an expansive section of Somerset House5 according to theme, namely day and night, activity and rest, the human and the machine, work and leisure, and the individual and the collective, with each zone distinguished spatially from the others. The relationship between the zones was carefully thought out by theater lighting designer Lucy Carter, who guided the gallerygoers through a twenty-four-hour period, from moonlight to sunset, from the first to fifth zones. It was a delight to see this high degree of attention to detail, both conceptual and experiential, given to an exhibition space.
Ger Zelinski
AfterImage September 2020
