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After almost three years, Light Projects, a Melbourne artist run initiative based in the suburb of Northcote, has closed. During its time, the gallery consistently showed work reflecting a strong commitment to research-based practices. Light Projects initially started as a collaborative effort by Leslie Eastman and Tamsin Green, evolving organically to include Imogen Beynon, Brooke Shanti Fenner, Brad Haylock and Stephen Palmer, who met through their time at Monash University. At Light Projects, they sought to provide a space where issues arising out of an interest in light, both in a phenomenological and symbolic sense, could be examined. This premise, along with the gallery’s store frontage and the support, through rental subsidy, of the psychoanalytic practice of Dr Patrick Johnson, formed the conceptual ground for much of the work shown at the space. These themes and conditions defining Light Projects made it more of a project in itself, than a project space. Some exhibitions seemed to stray or ignore this theme, but given the breadth of metaphor assigned to light in Western history, it is a kind of catchall. Such an all-encompassing category produces a kind of vertigo, but by linking this theme to a specific space, Light Projects was able to provide unique conditions for its elaboration and examination.
Ultra Neon was an exhibition which looked at light through the medium of neon. Work by Brad Haylock, Euan Heng, Fiona Macdonald, Sanja Pahoki, Kiron Robinson and Andy Thomson presented the street frontage as a kind of specialty store through the focus on neon, commenting on the ubiquity of this medium as well as celebrating it. Another show which used the store front in this way was curated by Brad