Wired News today has a feature story about a new show by Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is a contemporary artist who works with light and projection. One of his best-known works is The Weather Project, in which he created an artificial sun. As I occasionally dabble in lighting design for the theatre, I'm always interested to read about him.I first saw his work when the Hirshhorn Museum in DC called to ask for help repairing a Strand (Quartzcolor, actually, but that's another story) OneLight fresnel spotlight. It was part of his piece Round Rainbow which was being shown in their Refract, Reflect, Project exhibit.
Since the Smithsonian wasn't all too keen to ship part of their art collection up to Frederick, I piled into the truck with Sam (our head field-service technician, seen above admiring the "Round Rainbow") and we headed for the city.
Sam was able to get the fixture working again and the staff offered to let us see how it was used in the piece, and show us around the rest of the exhibit while everything was still being installed.
Lighting is an essential part of my work, so I naturally get excited by the sort of art they were showing off in this exhibit. There were weird projected-color pieces, light-as-sculpture pieces, and a wheelbarrow constructed of what appeared to be dozens of fluorescent tubes. I'll admit that I still don't get the wheelbarrow piece but I thoroughly enjoyed the Thomas Wilfred "lumia," especially given that I was able to look behind the screen and see the genuinely antique equipment that created the projections. The public generally never gets to see that part of a Wilfred work.Eliasson, on the other hand, makes a point of keeping the "gear" in plain view, which I love. For me, part of the fun of a piece like "Round Rainbow," is walking into a gallery and first being stunned by the light dancing around the space and then getting to see how he pulled it off. Refract, Reflect, Project has since closed, but there's lots of good images of Eliasson's work on the web, and Take Your Time, his current show at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, will be coming to New York in April of 2008.
link to Wired News Story
