Water / Light / Aura

On Abelardo Morell and James Casebere

At the points of collection, condensation, the intangibilities of water and light precipitate. In chemistry, certain conditions in a liquid lead to the process of precipitation, and a solid is formed.

This seemingly impossible (al)chemical moment has its parallel in the play of light, shadow, water. And, perhaps if there is a physics and a metaphysics, then there is also a chemistry and a metachemistry, where objectivity is transcended. Chemistry and physics collide at the point of molecular thinking, of the thresholds between the constituents of things and their forming into the real.

The vision of James Hamilton-Paterson's swimmer, opening Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds, looking up from below the water and seeing that surface of conditions meeting as a 'mirror of air' ..."The swimmer reflects on this mirror, imagining the sky weighing down on the sea and the sea holding up the atmosphere, curious about what exactly can be happening at the interface. If it were possible to magnify the activity, surely a buzzing skin of molecules would be revealed? Water molecules and air molecules so intermixed and saturated with atoms in common it would be undecidable which medium they constituted. At what point did these milling particles become waves?"

The swirling surfaces of chemistry and physics are momentarily held within the photograph. The phenomenological moment, where the process of condensation, precipitation, and state-shifting takes place. Light becomes solid, auratic...

James Casebere, Maghreb, 2005

Abelardo Morell, Light entering our house, 2004

Water becomes light, and light becomes water ...

James Casebere, Flooded Hallway from Right, 1999

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of Central Park Looking North-Summer, 2008