Tempo

The fluorescent sticklight, a key material in West's new installations, is perhaps one of the most effective visual spatial devices. Aside from its obvious exuberant colours, its most striking feature is its stripped back materiality. West has modified each sticklight with a particular colour. This colour palette is reminiscent of the neon lights that were so prominent in the 1960s coinciding with the emergence of installation art. Through methodically mixing each tube in relationship to each other, West cultivates our perceptions, drawing on Albers practice based theory that colour can only be truly understood in relation to other colours and, crucially, our own knowledge of the colour spectrum. The raw exuberance of the sticklights becomes a catalyst to trigger a response: the viewer is needed to activate the work. - Jack Welsh, 2013