In the immersive exhibition The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, Nate Young explored the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs. Often in his work Young addresses theological themes through text, diagrams, or architectural elements; during his FWM residency, the architectural element took the form of an eight-foot-tall metal pulpit. Within the installation environment, the viewer experienced a perceptual illusion in which the pulpit would disappear from view, causing a shifting awareness of the artwork. Young achieved this effect with a superblack paint developed for the aerospace industry and used by NASA, distinctive for its high light absorption and low outgassing properties. As Young described it, the paint produces “an effect where the object actually recedes into space, becoming conscious of its own presence.”
The second new work, a video installation, Closing no. 2, made use of a sixteenth-century holographic illusion, which in the nineteenth century came to be known as Pepper’s Ghost. Viewers of Young’s installation, while standing at the opening of a darkened room, see two, white-gloved hands that appear to be floating in space. Their movements echo a magician’s sleight of hand, and an overhead voice evokes the oratory style of a preacher. According to Young, “In a lot of my work, what I am doing is thinking of language as a system. Magic is sort of a system through which we have a contextual understanding of things. Because we agree what language is, we are able to communicate that the context is language.” In this work, Young stripped away as much visual material as possible to reveal systems of communication.
