Olafur Eliasson, “I grew up in solitude and silence” (1991)

Looking through his well-archived website, it was tricky deciding which Eliasson piece to include with this week’s theme of “lights.” His practice is deeply invested in that of lights, color, water, geometry, senses. While this piece doesn’t perform as impressive a show in terms of optical illusions as others, I find its simple symmetry reverent.

Vicki Dasilva, “Light Tartans: Fountain park #2” (2007)

This beautifully illuminated green and blue light structure is a stunning piece. They are a mix between sophistication and chaos.

hrrrthrrr:

DIY: Holiday Lights

I experimented and made these little fabric lights to hang in my apartment.  They were a little time consuming, but nothing a movie or two couldn’t help with.   

If you want to try your hand at making your own, I wrote up a tutorial here.

(via hrrrthrrr)

René Magritte, “The Empire of Light, II” (1950)

Magritte, always the trickster, plays daylight against street light. I feel like night/the street light is winning, but I could be wrong.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Veterans’ Flame” (2009)

Veterans’ Flame appeared in the Creative Time exhibition “This World and Nearer Ones” on New York’s Governors Island, within the historical site of Fort Jay. From Creative Time:

In Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Veterans’ Flame, the image of a candle flame moves with the recorded voices of veterans sharing accounts of war and its aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wodiczko conducted the interviews in April 2009, interested in having his subjects explore, through the act of remembering and retelling, the complex psychological space between the battlefield and their homes. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as surfaces for projections in his work, Wodiczko has focused on the ways in which architecture reflects collective memory, history, and the loss of life. Here, Fort Jay’s silent chambers are once again filled with the voices of soldiers, and a monument to history’s conflicts becomes a place to contemplate contemporary accounts of war and longing.

Paul Chan, “Ist Light” (2005)

This is a still from a video included in Paul Chan’s The 7 Lights exhibition, which you can see in the New Museum’s online exhibition. There the New Museum describes the 7 Lights:

This exhibition marks the American premiere of Paul Chan’s complete series “The 7 Lights,” offering a unique occasion to explore the practice of a New York-based artist whose work engages such fundamental themes as politics, poetry, war, death, and desire. Begun in 2005, Chan’s ambitious cycle combines obsolete computer technology with hypnotic imagery to create a series of enigmatic encounters with light and darkness. In the title, the word “light” has been struck through, drawing attention to its dramatic absence.

Presented alongside a selection of works on paper, older videos, and a new projection, the Lights create a vast image of cyclical destruction and rebirth, spread across floors and walls like light falling through windows. Structured over the course of a day, each of the Lights begins peacefully, with the warm colors of dawn. Slowly the atmosphere changes: silhouettes of objects rise up through the air and are dismantled by obscure forces, while human shadows plummet towards the ground. Like a dream deteriorating into a nightmare, the sequence becomes increasingly horrific until it fades to dusk and peace returns, waiting for day to break again.

Spencer Finch, “Paper Moon (Studio Wall at Night)” (2009)

Spencer Finch’s practice is often an exercise in re-creating the lighting or color of a certain place or moment in time. Paper Moon recreates the way lights of a passing train hit a window and trail around a darkened, a set of images I associate with my childhood of living next to the Metro-North trains. Finch must share my fascination with the repetition of the pattern of shapes on the walls, a ritual in the formalism of everyday life.