Chartwell Notes

"Spectra V is a suspended kinetic sculpture that imbues the gallery walls with shifting chromatic washes of colour. Both affecting and sensorial, it produces an immersive experience for audiences on a somatic level, playing with ocular perception. As an assemblage of fluorescent lights, power boards, and domestic fans repurposed from e-rubbish and consumer detritus, its truth to materials echoes modernist expanded cinema, where technological apparatus is made visible.

Ross Manning is an experimental sound artist, instrument builder, and tinkerer, whose visual-arts practice is fused together with his other interests. While Spectra is predominantly silent — aside from the whirring white noise of domestic fans — the work has an undeniable musicality, like an autonomous musical instrument performing aerial ballet to its own hidden optical soundtrack. Propelled on its axis by oscillating fans, Spectra live colour mixes in concert with gravity, hovering and pirouetting before twisting taut under the force of its own kinetic energy, from crescendo into diminuendo and back again.

In the body, colour perception is the result of light waves acting upon our optic nerves, which are transduced into electrical signals sent to the brain. Given that energy can be converted from one state to another, Spectra’s light waves have the potential to become sound vibrations — embodying the possibility of sound."

- Anna Briers, Curator Len Lye and Contemporary Art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and guest curator at The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.