VIrtual spin art: Twirl your smartphone and click. Better: Twirl yourself and click.
Art is in the everyday, even at the Van Dusen Gardens on another miserable rainy night last week.
There's no narrative in those hundreds of thousands of LED coloured lightbulbs strung through the Shaughnessy woodland gardens, no theatrical arc, nothing to learn – except a lot about perception and spatiality.
There's the miles of electrical wiring, the line of light that creates convoluting volumes that expand and contract as the body moves through the narrow paths and under tree canopies. And there's the absence of any sort of perceptible pattern, pulling viewers into the mystic. The lights are not lashed to the grid-like constructed environment for the annual Festival of Lights, but literally connected to nature, the thickets and groves and clumps. Against the black void of the heavens and earth, this luminous sculptural installation is not unlike the universe.
The visual field is not static but not kinetic. The movement is random, shivering, swaying and trembling in the icy gusts, unaffected by all the wandering visitors (well, except for the giant conifer with the four control buttons. That was fun).
The whole immersive light-sculpture has a whiff of "the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art," as Susan Sontag described the '60s Happenings movement.
It was a little psychedelic escape from this Crassmas season.
There's no narrative in those hundreds of thousands of LED coloured lightbulbs strung through the Shaughnessy woodland gardens, no theatrical arc, nothing to learn – except a lot about perception and spatiality.
There's the miles of electrical wiring, the line of light that creates convoluting volumes that expand and contract as the body moves through the narrow paths and under tree canopies. And there's the absence of any sort of perceptible pattern, pulling viewers into the mystic. The lights are not lashed to the grid-like constructed environment for the annual Festival of Lights, but literally connected to nature, the thickets and groves and clumps. Against the black void of the heavens and earth, this luminous sculptural installation is not unlike the universe.
The visual field is not static but not kinetic. The movement is random, shivering, swaying and trembling in the icy gusts, unaffected by all the wandering visitors (well, except for the giant conifer with the four control buttons. That was fun).
The whole immersive light-sculpture has a whiff of "the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art," as Susan Sontag described the '60s Happenings movement.
It was a little psychedelic escape from this Crassmas season.
 Thickets thick with neon tulip-like sconces made from plastic water bottles (above) and tunnels of violet lights (right) all contribute to an embodied experience. |  |
