Luminary Square

The construction invites a changing encounter as the viewer moves around its open framework. Translucent walls carry reliefs of bodies, inscriptions, and architectural motifs, bringing the intimacy of an illuminated image into the scale of a city. Within the exposed interior, branching wires mingle with ornamental fragments, fibrous remnants, and mineral-like surfaces. These materials give the city a porous anatomy, where infrastructure, sediment, and cultural memory occupy contiguous spaces. Color lends this anatomy its shifting atmosphere. Amber, violet, green, and blue inhabit the structures at different depths, drawing the eye through recesses and across interrupted planes. Illumination acquires a material density as it passes through the fabricated walls, allowing figures and textures to emerge within their glow. The viewer’s attention travels between the legibility of individual forms and the intricate entanglements that sustain their surroundings. Created later in the Polytopia cycle, Luminary Square makes explicit the ordering of a world that draws upon forces exerting influence beyond its current arrangements. Its exposed circuitry gives this tension a physical presence, releasing the energy that animates the city with its accumulated history and its capacity for further transformation.

Multimedia Sculpture, 2018

Wood, Aluminum, Plaster, Cloth, PLA 3d printed parts, HO scale streetlights, Neopixel and other LEDs.

16" x 16" x 60" H

“Luminary Square” picks up a core component of the “Polytopia” Constructions, the theme of the streetlight as a metonymic reference to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In a three-leveled structure, the project proposes an archeology or genealogy of the Age of Reason. Its top surface, lined with the fading roadmaps of the grand emancipation movement, upholds luminescent structures interspersed by streetlights, standing for the luminaries who sought to dissipate the long shadows of superstition and dogma with the liberating forces of reason and science. Below them lurk dimly lit structures that suggest the anti-enlightenment bastions of Romanticism, wantonly stacked tiers housing the Sublime and Baroque to avenge the human psyche’s need for obscurity along with its place in the sun. The cantilevered tiers of this second level are built on a platform that is busted through, surrounding a gaping precipice that hangs over the volcano resting at the bottom of the construction. Outfitted with a lens projecting a flickering light through the center of the middle level, the volcanic mound is the source of the igneous base matter subsequently sublimated into the streetlights up above, dispensers of pure light and twinkling effigies of a sustained fire that no longer burns.