Artist Maggie West Partners with Outernet to Celebrate the Natural World
Experience a three part exhibition celebrating the natural world through unprecedented use of time-lapse photography.
We’ve partnered with LA-based artist Maggie West to showcase three brand new series throughout The Now Building, Now Trending and Now Arcade, all completely free for visitors.
The experience uses time-lapse photography to explore many details of the natural world. Through West’s colourful lens, this exhibition examines the temporal shifts of everything from grains of sand to the stars in the sky.
🎥 Maggie West
💸 Free, no booking needed
📆 Launching Thursday 8th August
🕗 Check our website or app for times. Search for Terra, Pools or Ultraviolet
📍 Terra - The Now Building, Pools - Now Trending, Ultraviolet Now Arcade
🚆 Tottenham Court Road Station
In the first section of the exhibit Terra, West explores one night on Earth across different climates. From the arid expanse of a desert to the lush depths of a tropical rainforest, these surreal digital landscapes celebrate the biodiversity of our planet.
The artist created the unique video environments shown in The Now Building by photographing individual plants as they bloomed underneath multicoloured lighting. She then combined this footage with astrophotography of the stars and moon to create mesmerizing, moving digital collages.
The second section in the exhibition Pools, takes place in Now Trending. In this space, West goes from exploring giant landscapes, to finding inspiration in nature’s smallest pieces: grains of sand. While watching water absorb into sand may sound underwhelming, the artist’s innovative use of coloured lighting enlivens the experience and takes the viewer on a mind-bending, kaleidoscopic journey.
In the final space of the exhibit, West illuminates Now Arcade with her series Ultraviolet. The artist's piece for Outernet illuminates the intricate pathways through which plants absorb water by using ultraviolet light and fluorescent ink. To create the series, West photographed white flowers absorbing fluorescent ink under black lights, then combined this footage to create a glowing, magical garden. This piece serves as the perfect finale to this colourful, surreal collaboration between West and Outernet.
The show features an ethereal score by LA-based composer Matt Nordstrom. Each space in the exhibit combine’s West’s breath-taking videos with a unique, dreamlike soundscape peppered with field recordings of birds and insect sounds. The recordings are then slowed down, mirroring West’s visual explorations of temporal shifts.
While many artists create work using programs like AI and 3D animation, West’s work utilizes photography to capture magical details in the world around us. All of West’s vivid coloration effects use coloured lights, rather than post-production. From the needles of a cactus to grains of sand, the artist’s work for Outernet shows planet Earth in striking detail and defines a new style of time lapse photography.
“Time lapse photography unveils the hidden rhythms of the natural world all around us. By capturing these movements though vivid, colorful lighting, my work falls somewhere in between documentation and fantasy.” - Maggie West
“My objective is always to heighten Maggie’s work without distracting from the visuals and make the experience as inviting as possible.” - Matt Nordstrom
