Background
Angela Bulloch was born in 1966 in Rainy River, Ontario, Canada.
Angela Bulloch was born in 1966 in Rainy River, Ontario, Canada.
Bulloch received Bachelor of Arts at Goldsmiths' College in London, studying there during 1985 – 1988.
Angela Bulloch devoted her career fully to art and makes light sculptures and sound installations that display her interest in society and social structures, systems, patterns, rules, and symbols. A central theme in Bulloch's work is the semantics of space and the interplanetary and interstellar relation. The artist is interested in the creative overlapping of the mathematical with the aesthetical.
For the series "Night Sky" Angela Bulloch was inspired by the different types of visual representations of the earth, the solar system and the universe that astronomy experienced since the Enlightenment until the current era wherein globalization and popular culture play an important role. The artist is affected by the way people visually represent reality or how they map and visualize the starry sky seen from the earth. This resulted in "Night Sky", electronic simulations of our star-spangled sky, made out of felt and with LED lights, wherein constellations alternately illuminate. "Night Sky: Scorpio & Libra", which pertains to the collection of Hugo Voeten, visualizes by turns the constellations Scorpio and Libra.
Bulloch installed her first "Night Sky", titled "Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12", created in 2008, in the dome of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda of the New York Guggenheim Museum on the occasion of the exhibition. Afterward, the artist made several of those artificial night skies and that in various dimensions, from large-scale public installations to small domestic panels.
The exceptional feature of Bullochs "Night Skies" is that the artist works with representations that transcendent the invisible. Bulloch namely begins with a computerized map of the known stars of the universe, visible from earth, but then extrapolates the view point to a location far from the planet. Thus the artist creates a representation of real space, but as we could never see it. By transporting our perspective, Bulloch opens up a discussion about the singularity of our experience of space. Yet we find ourselves in a universe of infinite locations and vantage points, we construct, interpret and represent different types of information often merely in the same one-sided manner. More in general the artist, out of an interest in systems that structure social behavior, enables the viewer to experience how realities are organized as arrangements and structures. She critically approaches the urge to apply an ordinance on reality and to comprehend and organize everything in rules and systems.
Angela Bullochs well-known "Pixel boxes", wooden or aluminium cubes consisting at one side of a plexiglass screen, are also representations that surpass the visible. These boxes illuminate with an alternately, monochrome color field and represent extremely enlarged pixels, the smallest digital image units. By enlarging what people normally see, Bulloch challenges the viewer to imagine more of something invisible. Remarkable is that the artist chooses forms that people know very well from daily life and the surroundings. Bulloch lets the aesthetic in her works be determined by the technology or medium that she uses.
Next to sound installations and light sculptures, Angela Bulloch's oeuvre comprises wall paintings, photo series, video interventions, drawing machines and text works named "Rules." The artist is one of the Young British Artists. She currently lives and works in London and Berlin.
Angela is best known for her "pixel boxes", infinitely programmable illuminated boxes containing three fluorescent tubes capable of creating all 16 million colors of a standard computer screen. She was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997 and for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in 2005.
Bulloch is considered to be a member of the Young British Artists group that exhibited in London beginning in 1988.
