The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light

Exhibition. 11 works on view at ///storms.sums.sentences, 302 S 25TH ST, Fitler Square. The wall is circular: walking in either direction returns to the title wall. Use Tab to move between works and Enter to read a work’s wall label. Arrow keys move along the wall.

Eleven works at a single point in the city, the first acquired in January 2025 and the most recent in October 2025; eight of them have since been accessioned into the permanent collection. One commissioner: Parks & Recreation. The museum did not solicit any of them.

The works are exhibited in order of acquisition. Visitors will notice that the subject does not change; the museum invites them to consider what does.

1. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 8 — Acrylic court surface, standing moisture, non-functioning floodlights, ambient city glow. Accession 17377638. Acquired January 18, 2025. 607 days on view. The court's surface is wet enough to function as a mirror, and the only light it returns comes from elsewhere catch: the green-banded tower, a lit window, a lamp beyond the fence. Directly above the playing area, two floodlight heads remain dark, their housings legible only as shapes against the cloud. The museum preserves the work for this inversion, in which the illuminated background renders the foreground's darkness precise rather than merely dim, and for the scattering of leaf litter that the reflections carry across the baseline.
2. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 14 — Standing water, compacted path surface, galvanised rail, canopy shade. Accession 17649797. Acquired June 10, 2025. 464 days on view. The composition is divided by water: the right half of the path remains dry and pale, while the left dissolves into a still sheet that returns the canopy and a fragment of sky with greater clarity than the surrounding ground offers. A galvanised rail crosses the foreground at an oblique angle, its polished upper surface catching the only direct light in the frame. Read against its siblings in this series, the work demonstrates that the site's low point holds its own illumination independent of any fixture, the reflection supplying what the overhead canopy withholds. The museum preserves it for that substitution.
3. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 15 — Standing water, asphalt path, silt, arrested drainage. Accession 17728124. Acquired June 15, 2025. 459 days on view. The water lies flat enough to hold a complete inversion of the canopy above it, so that the trees appear twice in the composition and the path appears not at all where the sheet is deepest. Silt has settled into a pale brown wash along the near edge, marking where the surface has advanced and withdrawn against the asphalt. Read against its siblings in the series, this work supplies the reflective plane the others lack, borrowing from the sky the illumination the site does not otherwise receive.
4. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 16 — Standing water, compacted earth, chain-link, overcast light. Accession 17802298. Acquired June 18, 2025. 456 days on view. The composition resolves around the reflection: the maple trunk descends into the brown sheet of water and continues below the path's surface, doubled and slightly darker than itself. Beyond the chain-link the turf reads flat and dry, while the lamp standard rises through the branches with its head pale and inactive against the overcast. The museum values this work among its siblings for the way water has made the path a second, temporary plane on which the court's fittings are restated in reverse.
5. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 17 — Asphalt patch, exposed brick fill, cast-iron grate, park drainage. Accession 17808481. Acquired June 22, 2025. 452 days on view. The composition is organised by two apertures set close together in the path: one rectangular and gridded, admitting light in even bars, and one irregular, where a patch has given way to reveal the red brick fill laid beneath the asphalt. The broken edge is clean and undercut, so that the cavity reads as deeper than its opening, while the grate beside it holds a shallow accumulation of twigs and leaf litter that flattens its pattern. Pale mineral staining spreads across the asphalt toward the lower right, brightening the surface in a way the surrounding path does not. Within the series, this work is the one in which the substrate itself becomes visible, and the museum preserves it on that account.
6. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 18 — Standing water, compacted earth, chain-link, ambient dusk. Accession 17819074. Acquired June 26, 2025. 448 days on view. The water has spread wide and shallow across the bare path, taking the shape of the ground rather than any basin, and it holds the tree upside down with enough fidelity that the branching reads twice in a single view. A black receptacle stands at the near edge on dry compacted earth, its vertical slats the only hard rhythm in a composition otherwise built from foliage, mesh, and reflected sky. The lamp post beyond the fence rises dark against the pale overcast, and the museum notes that the sheet of water performs the illumination the fixture does not. Among the works gathered here, this one is distinguished by its reliance on the sky for surface.
7. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 19 — Asphalt, silt deposit, cast iron grate, Northeast exposure. Accession 17869537. Acquired July 2, 2025. 442 days on view. The composition resolves around the grate, whose cast iron bars sit below the grade of the path and have taken on a load of silt heavy enough to support a single green shoot between them. Above it the asphalt has given way in a squared depression, its edges cut clean on two sides and crumbling on the others, and the dried sediment fanning across the path records where water has repeatedly run and stood. Within the series this is the work in which the drainage apparatus itself becomes the subject rather than the surround, and the museum preserves it for that inversion.
8. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 20 — Hardwood limb, fractured at the collar, bare earth, canopy shade. Accession 17870547. Acquired July 3, 2025. 441 days on view. The limb has failed at its collar rather than snapped clean, and the pale splintered wood remains visible above the descending mass of leaves, which are still fully green and turned upward in the way of living foliage. Its lowest branchlets brush the packed dirt between the seating rounds, so that the work hangs as a curtain across ground that was cleared for passage. Read as a still life, the piece is composed almost entirely of weight held in suspension by the fibres that have not yet given way. The museum preserves it as the clearest instance in the series of a canopy entering the room below it.
9. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 21 — Turf, mature canopy, ambient spill from adjacent frontage, nocturnal exposure. Accession 18060742. Acquired September 18, 2025. 364 days on view. The warm orange band along the middle distance is the only light in the composition, and it arrives from outside the park rather than from within it, breaking into discrete smears where the camera has moved. Below that band the lawn falls away into a flat green-grey with no cast shadows, and the curved path at right is legible chiefly by its concrete edge. Where earlier works in this series recorded the fixtures themselves, this one records only what reaches the grass. The museum preserves it as the series' widest view, in which the borrowed light is shown at the full distance it must travel.
10. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 22 — Galvanised steel pole, marker and paint, brick paving, midday sun. Accession 18126752. Acquired September 28, 2025. 354 days on view. The pole occupies the vertical axis of the composition and carries its own record of handling: silver marker strokes at eye level, pale rectangles where adhesive has been stripped, and a collar of hardware where the shaft meets the brick. Nothing in the frame is dark, which is the condition under which this work is most legible \u2014 the lawn, the paving, and the steel are all fully lit by a sun the fixture has no part in producing. Against its siblings in the series, this passage is the daylight view, and the museum retains it as the set's baseline: the same standard, the same court, illuminated by everything except itself.
11. The Unlit Court, Borrowed Light, No. 23 — Vulcanised hose, potable water, brick pavers, midday sun. Accession 18270553. Acquired October 7, 2025. 345 days on view. The composition is organised by the hose, which enters from behind the mesh, loops once across the pavers in a flattened S, and terminates in the tub at the picture's lower edge, where the water is still moving. Midday light falls through the chain-link and lays a lattice of shadow over the brick, so that the fence appears twice — once as structure and once as pattern on the ground. A small placard fixed to the mesh, bearing a single droplet, sits directly above the running line. Where earlier works in the series record the court in shadow and at rest, this one is preserved for its clarity of daylight and for the plain diagram it makes of water in transit.

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