Where the Light Dwells

Kelly-McKenna Gallery presents Where the Light Dwells, a group exhibition sparked by owner and founder Caitlin Kelly-McKenna’s close following of the restoration of Notre-Dame’s medieval stained-glass windows, an experience that reframed light for her not as mere illumination, but as the artwork’s very medium. Rather than treating light as a mere illuminant, Where the Light Dwells gathers together artists who build luminosity into the very structure of their work through transparency, reflection, refraction, and iridescence so that light becomes material, subject, and meaning at once. The exhibition features artworks by Resurrect Studio, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, and Tom White, whose practices collectively invite viewers to consider the gallery as a secular sanctuary where light performs, transforms, and reveals.

In Where the Light Dwells, Resurrect Studio’s glass sculptures stage light as a living element. Layered panes, subtle tints, and polished planes collect and release illumination so that color appears to hover in space. As a studio practice dedicated to material clarity and sustainable craft, Resurrect Studio works at the intersection of art and design; their sculptures echo architectural glass and devotional objects alike, aligning directly with the exhibition’s inquiry into light as both structure and spirit.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s canvases bring a distinctly stained-glass coloration to painting. Veils of pigment are layered until color seems to glow from within. Bernadet’s long exploration of color, memory, and perception resonates with the exhibition’s premise: his pictures are not windows onto the world so much as vessels that hold light. They are quietly devotional in their effect, yet entirely painterly in means.

Photographer Tom White turns to the sparkling minerals of the natural world, fixing fleeting glints and prismatic flares in carefully composed images. By isolating crystalline structures and their optical behavior, White treats light as a geological event pressed into matter and released under the camera’s gaze. In Where the Light Dwells, his photographs function like portable chapels of attention, inviting viewers to contemplate the sacred in the seemingly ordinary.

Where the Light Dwells thus proposes that light is not only what lets us see art; in the right hands, light is the art: a medium that can be cut, layered, burnished, and composed. Drawing a conceptual line from the sanctuaries of medieval Paris to contemporary studios, the exhibition asks how artists today make illumination intrinsic whether by transmitting it through glass, scattering it across enamel, building it into color, or trapping it in mineral.