Austin Irving

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present NIGHT LIGHTS, an exhibition of large-format, analog
photographs by Los Angeles based artist Austin Irving. Captured across New York, Hong Kong, and Bangalore, India, these images document abstracted, transient spaces - hotel rooms, guest quarters, and temporary interiors - bathed in the glow of urban night. 

Raised in New York City, Austin Irving has long been attuned to the glow of artificial city lights - the way they shape our internal rhythms, disrupt sleep, and redefine our sense of space. Printed on a large scale, NIGHT LIGHTS embraces the emotional impact of spaces that are not quite private, not quite public, but somewhere in between. Within these photographs, ambient illuminations become a kind of psychic residue, coloring the mind as much as the room. The psychological texture of the work - marked by jet lag, displacement, and a yearning for stillness - imbues each piece with a hushed intimacy. 

Working in darkness, often over the course of several hours, Irving allows the camera to absorb what the eye cannot fully perceive. Each long exposure reveals strange distortions, shifts in color, and luminous textures that collapse the borders between artist, medium, and atmosphere. As though suspended in time, these spectral images capture intimate periods of solitude and transience, rendering them visible. Within One Hour, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, a neon storefront throbs like an apparition, projected onto the ceiling of Irving’s hotel room, emerging from a place between sleep and wakefulness, between stillness and drift. 
Meticulously primed like a canvas, each photograph has been painted by the floating color story of the world outside, allowing for the intrusion of the unexpected. This commitment to process introduces an element of uncertainty and surrender, even from behind closed curtains - as is captured within the matte, dreamy pinks and reds of Four Hours, Tindlu Road, Bangalore, India. In this way, Irving’s photographs impart the beauty located within the technical imperfections of the medium, granting her film a voice of its own. 

As a visual diary, NIGHT LIGHTS invites the viewer into the porous bleed between internal experience and the external world. Through fleeting apparitions and saturated shadows, Austin Irving's photographs offer unseen moments where reality slips and time is softened. It is a meditation on the flickering streetlights and passing cars that slip into our consciousness, the quiet places where anxious memory lingers, and the strange beauty that arises when we loosen our grip on control.