John Hansard Gallery is proud to present a major new project by artist Morgan Quaintance.
Exploring themes of home and belonging in contemporary society, Available Light features interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Japan, alongside fragments of conversations with renters in both Tokyo and London. These elements spark a thought-provoking dialogue between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often-unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities.
Through Morgan Quaintance’s signature immersive sound design, combined with impressionistic images and abstractions filmed on 16mm, the artist creates an austere, dreamlike, and subtly poignant portrait of residential precarity.
Two short films accompany Available Light. Seikokan III is a direct animation work, using the technique of ink drawing on film to make use of the left-over, or unused, 16mm material shot in Tokyo. Whilst Walking Distance takes footage of Mount Fuji and combines it with subtitles that explain the distances from Quaintance’s temporary home in Tokyo and the most frequently visited sites during his stay in 2024.
Available Light was shot and produced as part of a parallel collaboration with Anniversary Fellow and University of Southampton’s Senior Research Fellow, Laura Harris. Designed as a research experiment, Harris proposed the question: what would happen if an artist and sociologist were to embark on research together, on equal footing?
What emerged was not a collaboration as such, but rather a scenario that allowed them to work on parallel tracks – treating interdisciplinarity as a way of ‘letting in more light’.
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