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Ben Godward, Installation view 2, 2022. Pigmented urethane at the  Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

Ben Godward, installation view, 2022. Pigmented urethane at the Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

Heather Hutchison, installation view  at the Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

Heather Hutchison, Promenade In Green, 2020. Mixed media, reclaimed Plexiglas, birch plywood box at the Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

Shaina Gates, Artifacts, 2021. Lumen prints on gelative silver paper at the Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

Shaina Gates, Lumne-Negative (XL 3) and (XL 2), 2021. UV photogram on black and white film at the Lumen show at the Albany Airport Gallery. Photo William Jaeger

How perfect to use the panoramic third floor windows of the Airport Gallery’s exhibition space to show artworks that play with that most fundamental of artistic media: light itself. “Lumen” doesn’t supply projectors or lights — instead the three artists use existing light to find ways of conjuring vague glows from behind surfaces, or inviting ambient light in and tricking it into revealing the subject. 

The most literal and maybe most subtle of the works are those by Heather Hutchison, whose small wall-mounted objects finesse their hues into deceptive, fugitive auras. Some sneak a patch of unseen color onto the back of a clear acrylic sheet a few inches from the wall, reflecting a fuzzy glow there. Others are wooden boxes with painted ambiguous surfaces that are not quite opaque, so the hue or maybe a bit of mysterious material inside cast some of the light back at you. In all of these, color and luminance change as you drift.

You might say this is just trickery, but its subtle effects persist, like elusive afterimages, the viewer an active element. The simplicity of the artist’s objects is part of its sincerity, though you might wish for works that evolve into more complexity, greater size, and longer engagement.

If Hutchison’s work is soft-spoken, the heavy, colorful, and angular urethane sculptures by Ben Godward are bordering on raucous, even though you may find many of them rather sleepy at first, prostrated on tilted white slabs near the windows. These long triangular spikes are poised on their platforms as if waiting for something. If there is an expectation of color and light playing off of these white planes, activated by the spikes, it wasn’t obvious.

"Lumen: Artworks engaged with and activated by light" 

Where: Albany International Airport Gallery, Albany International Airport, 737 Albany Shaker Road

Hours: 7 a.m.-11 p.m. daily

Admission: F ree. There is free parking in the Short Term Parking area for the first 30 minutes. Parking after that is $2/hour.

Info: https://albanyairportartandcultureprogram.com/185-2/ or 518-242-2241

The objects work on more direct terms, absorbing and expressing pure pigmented plastic saturation in a raw, space odyssey, steam-punk way. They are like relics from another planet, or from some low-budget sci-fi flick. A couple of them have parts that appear to be melting away, still active. Between the windows, two even larger spikes hang in warm gallery light like totems, inviolable.

Light, as an actor in this theater, becomes critical in Shaina Gates’s works not just in how we view them but in how they were made. There are two stages to the artworks, starting with small, folded pieces of photographic sheet film. These look like acetate origami birds or geometric abstractions, pinned to the wall in three dimensions, their amber and berry hues on thin acetate partially transparent. They are simple objects, but the materials give them an internal credibility having to do with photography, laid out before us with simple plays of symmetry.

The second phase confirms the first, because Gates has made prints, or photograms, using these objects, which means she exposed photographic paper to sunlight with her folded sheets of film pressed on top, creating negative shadow designs. The geometry remains, though without any actual depth, and the prints carry through with their own various warm colors due to deliberately primitive methods using both long exposures and apparently some kind of chemistry. If any one example might be vaguely too simple, the whole process, and the materials themselves, give the enterprise a curious digital age exceptionalism, devoid of nostalgia.

The show succeeds in small, curious ways, piece by piece and artist by artist. But it is the curation by gallery director Kathy Greenwood that lifts it all higher. The show is additive, with effects of color, material, abstraction, and optical effects working and building in a beautiful whole, opposite the big sky, an occasional jet cutting across the view.

Jaeger has been teaching in the Art Department at the University at Albany for over twenty years. He identifies as a photographer and also writes about photography and art. He avoids social media as much as possible. You can reach him at wmjaeger@gmail.com.