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LIGHT ART / PROFILE
cles support this magical creation and these form a skeletal column from which the lights are powered. The lights appear to ex- pand and retract, palpitating and vacillating through different rhythms and patterns. “You don’t feel like you’re watching for something you’ve missed,” Villareal says of the artwork. “It’s never going to repeat the same progression of sequences again. It’s like an elaborate shuffle scheme, which is being reassembled dynamically.” Villareal once again used LED in 2012 to create ‘Cosmos’ for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in New York. The work was created in homage to the late Cornell astronomy professor and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who popular- ized atronomy and cosmology through his influential telivision show and a number of popular books. Cosmos is made up of 12,000 energy efficient LEDs that have been affixed to a grid-like framework and placed on the ceiling of one of the most visible buildings on the campus, which can also be seen both on the university grounds and in the nearby town of Ithaca.
The light patterns were programmed by Villareal both in his home studio and on campus where he spent a week in residence observing the atmosphere the artwork would be placed in. In order to create a successful light artwork, sympathetic to its environment, the artist carefully noted the architecture that would surround the piece, the museum building being designed by the famed Chinese architect I. M. Pei who was responsible for the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris and the stirring John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He also noted the weather patterns in the area, cloud movements and even the flocks of geese that fly over Ithaca in early Autumn. All these stimuli and the artist’s reactions to them were referred to in the patterns of light that were ultimately pro- duced, his knowledge of the area the sculp- ture would be placed in also meant that he did not create something that would deter from what is generally a quiet studious atmosphere surrounded by grass and trees. “It’s almost like a musical instrument that you have to tune to get just right,” Villarel said of trying to get the piece to mesh with its surroundings. “It’s a process of discovery, because I don’t know in advance what the answer to the problem is going to be.” The display has since proved popular, with a ‘zero gravity’ bench being installed directly underneath the light work, allowing observ- ers to lie beneath his conjured universe and gaze upwards, alone or with friends, encouraging a communal immersion in the project.
Villareal’s Stars, a 2007 project which used White LEDs and metal armature to bring a touch of the celestial to the windows of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Leo Villareal is often labelled an LED pioneer, a man who took a new form and perfected it into an evocative art form capable of expressing emotion. It is often noted how many colours LED can produce, thousands of hues and shades that no doubt put the capabilities of a paint tin and an easel to shame, but it is also often asked if it is possible to be truly captivated by some- thing that you have to switch on, something transient, something that isn’t a constant window into another time and place, and is instead, like Cylinder II, more machine than personal creation. What is beyond doubt though is that the LED art produced by Villareal offers an individ- ual experience that traditional art cannot. Weather it is conjuring galaxies in the arched windows of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, summoning up a swarm of fireflies
in a dark room in the Hayward Gallery, or leasing a new life to the Bay Bridge, the art is brought to the person, it is easier to find, and is perhaps, easier to enjoy. Buckminster Fuller once said: “I am enthu- siastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting contrivings of yesterday.” In his pioneering use of LED, Leo Villareal, the one time sculpter, is looking to the future of art, not the past.
www.villareal.net
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