The Thousands

There’s something fascinating about art like Alan Rose’s, that’s designed to mess with your head. I don’t mean in that important but often riskily-sententious ‘makes you think about confronting all the ways in which you are privileged’ way, or even the ‘LOL that is not how scale works’ of Minimalism. Nope, having now spent three visits staring at Between the Darkness and the Stage, I am comparing their effects to those of NMDA receptor antagonists (I totally knew what they were already and did not just Google ketamine).

Rose explains his work – sculptural geometries made of light as well as objects – as provocations to conscious visual attention. This show happens in the dark, with the viewer roped off about a metre away from the surfaces of the works, which are constructed out of regular forms that are confused by projections playing over their surfaces. It’s hard to tell if what’s changing is what you’re seeing or what’s there, and thinking about that while watching it happen is majorly recreationally dissociative.