Project #1: Light Sculpture
Assignment: Create a light sculpture or light installation in the style of the constructivists, futurists, cubists or kinetic artists using "non video" materials. Bring this sculpture to Class 2 and be ready to explain your influences and how light is used as the primary medium for this sculpture.
Our starting concept was the idea of interrogation, and multiple perspectives a la Cubism. We thought about bright lights shining in your face, and being intimately confronted with yourself and all your flaws and wrongdoings. So, that fairly quickly led us to the idea of reflective materials and planes at different angles to reflect yourself and the light back at you in different ways. We even talked about the idea of the "dark" side of the light -- light that's so bright it causes you pain. So interrogation, confrontation, reflection, and pain were our running themes as we got to work. Because we wanted it to be very intimate and in-your-face, we decided that our sculpture needed to be something you could stick your head into.
Much of the rest of the process was determined by the materials we decided to work with; we started off with aluminum foil and highly reflective mylar. Kody built a basic armature using rolled-up aluminum foil, to keep the structure somewhat flexible. We then constructed the shell out of planes of the mylar:
Since one of our original ideas had been to incorporate different materials with different degrees of reflectivity, we pasted squares, triangles, and geometric/Cubist-inspired shapes made out of silver tissue paper, shiny party decorations, and thin plexiglass on the inside of the shell.
Here is the final piece on the inside:
...and from the outside:
We were not unhappy with the outcome, but we realized that we were perhaps not quite so effective at communicating our original ideas. My first reaction after putting on the finished sculpture was, "It kind of feels like being inside of a Christmas tree ornament." Not the best association to make when you're going for interrogation and confrontation and pain.
