Adela Andea: Midnight Zone(s)

The Houston-based, Romanian-born artist returns to the gallery after a yearlong, highly lauded exhibition at the Center for International Light Art in Unna, Germany. Andea’s installations and light sculptures employ a unique visual vocabulary based on reinterpreting our current perception of nature through the eyes of new media art using the latest technologies. Inspired by the bioluminescence of underwater sea life, Andea continues to focus on form, color, and space, fully submerging the viewer into an all-encompassing and temporal experience.

In this current body of work, Andea evokes the literary adventures of French novelist Jules Verne, taking the viewer on a futuristic voyage into the dark depths of the ocean, also known as the midnight zone. Building a relationship between technology and nature, the artist distills her observations of the world into glowing candy-colored light sculptures that are akin to the sea creatures one might find in the darkest part of the ocean.

Similarly to her contemporaries, James Turrell and Keith Sonnier, Andea is investigating how light can radically alter and rearticulate the space shared by the work and the viewer. Utilizing and combining mass-produced industrial materials such as LED lights, flex neon, foam, and Plexiglas, the artist creates a fantasy world poised between organic biological forms and glowing technological structures, confounding the viewer with illusions of real light versus electrical light.