Phuturistic Colour

About

Colour is simply light of varying wavelengths, thus each colour has its own particular wavelength and energy. This exhibition draws on different aspects of colour and how it can be used to excite our perceptions of the world. It draws on our idea of our senses and how they might evolve in the future.

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)

In an important regard we are determined by our senses and the way we perceive the world. We generally acknowledge our senses to be objective or determined by the ‘truth’ of an outside world; however, this is subject to a lot more relativism than we sometimes care to admit. Cases of ambiguity like the black/blue dress, show how this can be just a case of its stark reality.

The book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, shows us that colour is not merely a set condition of but that we evolve our sense of colour and perceive different. It explains why even the Greeks are considered to have no colour blue and how terms like Orange, Ash and Turquoise, generally develop later because they come from objects in our language rather than our external perception of the world.