Voyage
Where light ended up becoming part of the painting.
In 2016, VOYAGE marked a decisive shift in Tommy Balogh’s practice. Developed after a year of research and experimentation, the exhibition brought together large-scale abstract painting, translucent surfaces and ultraviolet light, centred around the monumental 12-metre VOYAGE: Fingerprints of Consciousness. It was the largest work Tommy had created to that point – and the clearest expression yet of an idea that had been quietly forming for years: a painting did not have to remain the same every time it was seen.
Much of that thinking developed in an unlikely studio beneath Canberra’s City West multi-level car park, today operated by Secure Parking. The space came about almost by accident. While Tommy was creating an earlier six-metre live artwork, a passer-by repeatedly stopped to watch and eventually offered him access to a vacant commercial area within the car park. What looked like leftover urban space became a laboratory large enough to paint, build, illuminate and experiment at a scale that conventional studios rarely allowed. ABC later documented how the work gradually spread beyond the studio itself, from the lower level into commissioned commercial work for the lifts and other parts of the building.
For VOYAGE, Tommy turned his attention outward — and inward. He studied thousands of deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope, fascinated by the visual relationships between immense cosmological structures and patterns found at far smaller scales. The works were painted across plexiglass and other translucent materials using fluorescent and light-reactive media, exploring the space between the cosmic world, human perception and what remains unseen until conditions change.
The exhibition opened at Nishi Gallery in NewActon, with the gallery extending its hours from midday until midnight so visitors could experience the works under completely different lighting conditions. In daylight they presented one image; under UV illumination, colours intensified, hidden forms emerged and entirely different layers became visible. Contemporary coverage described VOYAGE as Tommy’s most ambitious project to date and a culmination of a year of experimentation.
The response brought the project national attention through ABC News, but its lasting significance was more personal. VOYAGE showed Tommy that light could move beyond illuminating an artwork and become part of the artwork itself – giving people a reason to stop, return and look again.
The exhibition ultimately became a launch point rather than a conclusion. Its momentum fed back into the City West studio, which evolved into LIGHT FUSION, an experimental environment for live painting, luminous installations and increasingly ambitious ideas. Years later, VOYAGE:Fingerprints of Consciousness would still form the centrepiece of exhibitions there, brought back to life under changing light.
VOYAGE was the moment the painting stopped ending at its edges – and the space around it began to matter just as much.