The Light That Does Not Touch Us

Katharine Suchan, MFA 2024, Painting

The Light That Does Not Touch Us, comes from a line in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost. She described the blue of distance, an optical phenomenon in the landscape that makes the faraway shift to shades of blue. It happens because the light scatters before it reaches our eyes, becoming lost. In the blue world. “the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you never can go.” This space becomes a place only traversable through sight, leaving the exploration of that landscape to exist in the mind.  

In my paintings, I expand color to propose new worlds with new distances. This terra-incognito compresses and expands the shifts in season, mood and temperature. Each world bridges sites, time, and objects that are visited-imagined-theatrical-psycological. My work becomes a mix of memory palace, repeat pattern, map, and mnemonic image.  

The show questions what im/possibilities might exist in the land of yonder. It encourages losing oneself on the journey to see what unfolds between the space and place of here and there, then and now.