Adam Swica’s studio-constructed photographs regularly enlist projected light as a shaping device, whether resolving in pictorial scenes or recording dimensional volumes through multiple or time exposures. While often involving the building of large sets, his latest suite of works under the title, Rotunda, charts a reductive approach, where light itself is shaped through reflection, projection and reflected projection. While without material contours, save for a small corner of the image, light masquerades as form. Shooting on film and utilizing multiple exposures, Swica coaxes an interior volume of domed canopies and multiple, recessed spaces. Likened to sound, light is pictured as a permeating quality: structural yet ethereal, responsive.

With the suite of photographs entitled, Flutter, Swica uses light, movement, and duration to coax dimensional planes within the photographic frame. Shooting on film, Swica begins by suspending two roughly cut paper shapes and inscribes their repeated movements onto a single negative; he then transports his camera to a second site in the studio — a black box suffused with particulate to commit a light drawing to the mix. Variations in opacity and translucency are determined by the durational light of a long exposure, with successive captures potentially infringing or obliterating preceding ones. This in-camera building of the image is an active yet unpredictable construction, situated somewhere between an automatic drawing and planned structure. Their trajectory is reconfigured as an ethereal, contiguous whole, a volume sculpted by light through time.