Wood, polymer, 12V LED lights
Robert Montgomery is a contemporary artist working in "poetic and melancholic post-situationist tradition." His works often take the form of billboards that may exist in either an indoor or outdoor environment. This particular piece is considered to be a "recycled sunlight poem," where the use of solar energy during the day allows the piece to glow at night. Montgomery's use of contemplative text among a landscape presents a unique situation of human presence. The combination of poetry and visual illumination are at work within this billboard-style display. These two factors merge together and exist in concert with the landscape, and in the evening this installation becomes illuminated among the tree-line behind the Visitors Center building at Art Omi.
Born in Scotland in 1972 and currently based in London, Robert Montgomery studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then in the core program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Working with poetic texts as the basis of his art, Robert makes billboard pieces, light pieces (recycled sunlight poems), woodcut pieces and watercolour; he showed in Orientale at the 2011 Venice Biennale and he was the British artist selected for the first biennale in India, The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which opened in December 2012.