Mary Temple, “Half Round” from the “Light Installations” series, 2002 to present. At Bethel University’s Olson Gallery through December 12. Photo by the author

At first glance, Bethel University’s Olson Gallery appears, but for a pair of comfortable sitting chairs, simply empty: there aren’t any framed pictures on the walls, no sculptural installations on the floor. Linger a while, and the shadows thrown on the perimeter walls, and on the columns in the middle of the room, call themselves to your attention:  they appear to be shadows of leafy tree limbs seen through the frame of a window, mostly. Then you notice something uncanny: the play of light and shadow is somehow fixed on the room’s surfaces. The images cast are unnaturally static. Olson Gallery is a balcony exhibition space, open to the grand hall of the college’s student life center below and, beyond that, fronted by a large expanse of windows. Look out the actual windows, and there aren’t really trees beyond to cast those shadows; no overhanging visible limbs to catch on the light.

A look at the exhibition materials confirms, it is all trompe l’oeil, an illusion of light and shadow cleverly painted on the wall. Mary Temple’s “Half Round” is a subtle ruse – the primer she uses to paint the base coat of the room falls on the spectrum somewhere between eggshell and dove gray. Temple then uses a brighter, buttery white to bathe the room in painted light, delineating “shadows” cast from imagined and remembered landscapes. Depending on your vantage point, the installation’s “frames” of light and shadow may be viewed together, as a single panorama grazing the gallery’s columns and three walls; or, you might zoom in on each section individually, seeing several individual vignettes.

Detail from “Half Round.” Photo by the author

Because the room is also filled with natural light, I quickly find myself going ’round the room, my nose inches from the wall, trying to disentangle “real” light and shadow from Temple’s persuasive simulations. At one point, I’m sure a particular line of shadows on the ceiling must be real – a repeating pattern of refracted, just-bent squared panes – arcing from the midday-lit bank of windows beyond the balcony to the column where I sit. I watch the shadows for some tell-tale movement, and that first burst of confidence wanes. They must be real becomes they could be, and, finally, the realization that they aren’t. Those sun- and-glass bent squares are just paint after all.

In her artist statement, Temple says, for the last several years, she’s “made doubt a primary focus of [her]work.” About her series of “Light Installations,” in particular, she writes: “I rely on the viewer’s knowledge and memory of light intersecting space to raise questions of belief and doubt. These pieces are meant to give the viewer time to enjoy not-knowing, and to privilege questions over answers.”

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

As I jot down some notes in the gallery’s easy chair, I’m distracted by the sharp lines of dancing shadow thrown on the notebook by my pen and hand from the track lighting shining down from above.  In that moment, I’m eight years old, all tucked in bed and waiting for sleep in the murky not-quite dark of evening. If I adjust my eyes’ focus just so, the windbreaker tossed on the bedpost becomes a hooded figure at my bedside. Shift focus back and forth, and the shadowy form is both jacket and menace at once — like Schrödinger’s cat.

And sitting there, surrounded by Temple’s marvelous fakery, for just a minute, I remember when I knew hardly anything about the world for sure, except that there was surely magic to be found in its shadowed corners.

Mary Temple’s “Half Round” from her Light Installations series (2002 to present) is on view in Bethel University’s Olson Gallery through December 20, in the Community Life Center, 3900 Bethel Drive, St. Paul. For gallery hours and more information about the show, visit www.bethel.edu/events/arts/galleries/.