AD-REFLEX
In their new series of small-scale light-box works, artist duo AD-Reflex explore the subway as a space of transit, passage, and transformation. The subway becomes a metaphor for this movement between states: between one place and another, between presence and absence, and between analogue and digital image-making. In these small, illuminated environments, AD-Reflex transform fleeting moments of urban movement into layered encounters with perception, memory, and space.
The works bring together painting, digital printing, and engraving in layered constructions that evoke the experience of moving between spaces, both physically and psychologically. At the back of each light box is a painted image, functioning as both a spatial backdrop and an atmospheric field. Positioned in front of the painting are multiple layers of printed and engraved Perspex, each carrying fragmented images of people moving through subway systems. Illumination activates these layers, revealing subtle relationships between foreground and background while producing an interplay of transparency, reflection, shadow, and colour.
Rather than treating these mediums as oppositional, AD-Reflex approach them as collaborators - each capable of extending, disrupting, and reimagining the others possibilities. Their work is characterised by a wealth of pictorial fragments with a flowing and somewhat deceptive spatial arrangement that results in a collage-like gathering of distinct pictorial motifs.
With a strong focus on process, their work seeks to open a space where painting is no longer confined to static surfaces, and digital technologies are not reduced to tools of reproduction. Instead, both become sites of active inquiry - where illusion is constructed and undone, and where play generates new forms of seeing, thinking, and experiencing images in an ever increasing mediated world.