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Mostyn gallery, Llandudno, WalesThe longer you stay the more there is to experience in this giddying, transporting exhibition that comes with a dash of danger“Neon in daylight is a great pleasure”, wrote Frank O’Hara in one of his celebrated poems, written on his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So it is for Cerith Wyn Evans, whose entanglements of white neon hang beneath the skylights at Mostyn gallery. Llandudno is not Times Square, but I feel suspended too, buoyed-up among the effervescent neon and fitful autumn sunlight. The air is quietly humming, and a barely detectable, distant music is resonating through a nearby arrangement of glass sheets, slung from the rafters like a little head height maze. Small contact speakers are attached to the panes of glass, making them vibrate, amplifying the sound of the artist at the piano, recorded in two sessions a decade apart. With the glissandos and the staccatos, the reflections and refractions of the neon also come and go as you move between the panes. You learn to tread carefully here, standing still and walking between the galleries. The longer you stay, the more there is to experience.Large mobiles sway but barely turn in the air currents. Their dangling, canted planes are repurposed car and truck windscreens. Each one is cracked by a traffic shunt or breaker’s yard carelessness, or bulls-eyed by the impact of a stone thrown up from the road. They sway and swing high up towards the roof, and hang at odd angles from their beams at eye-level and down towards the floor. As they move, they give us bulging, distorted reflections of the tall columns of lights among which they hang. These lighted columns don’t quite touch the floor either. I’m reminded of one of the little anecdotes John Cage retold in his book Silence: a Buddhist monk asks his teacher what difference he would feel when he attained enlightenment. “No difference,” the master tells him, “except the feet are a little bit off the ground.” Continue reading...