Introduction by Steven B. Johnson. Text by Sara Hart, JoAnne Northrup, Michael Rush.
American artist Leo Villareal (born 1967) is the most prominent light sculptor among a younger generation of light artists. In 1997, having abandoned his work with interactive television, Villareal began to pursue a more systems-based approach, devising complex light sculptures in which he combined strobe lights, neon, and most recently, LED bulbs activated by the artist's own extraordinary custom-made software. The effect of these bulbs, and the software that steers their flickering patterns, is cumulative and magical: thousands of tiny white LEDs may resemble a starry night as seen in a planetarium (Villareal installed this work in the windows of the Peter Jay Sharp Building at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), while tubes of colored LEDs masked by a diffuser give a softer effect that resembles something like a Monet painting of water lilies set in motion. This volume accompanies the first museum survey of Villareal's hypnotic and exhilarating light sculptures at the San Jose Museum of Art.
"Leo Villareal revisits the familiar vocabulary of the sublime: expansiveness, luminosity, wonder, spectacle. Yet, his tools are those of the twenty-first century and his mindset comes out of the digital age rather than Romanticism. This sort of 'techno-sublime' creates a fascinating bounce in his work between experience and artifice, between transcendence and our inevitable contemporary self-consciousness, between memory and the momentary… Rather than suspending time or spiritualizing space (the path to the old-time sublime), Villareal does the opposite. Light may stream or blink in swift, hyperactive digital patterns. Then again, swaths of color may blend so gradually that the change is lulling, barely noticeable at first. He speeds up time; he slows it down. Villareal makes the viewer viscerally aware of the space of seeing and thus of the tempos of being."
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 11.75 in. / 192 pgs / 210 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $65 ISBN: 9783775726566 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 10/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Introduction by Steven B. Johnson. Text by Sara Hart, JoAnne Northrup, Michael Rush.
American artist Leo Villareal (born 1967) is the most prominent light sculptor among a younger generation of light artists. In 1997, having abandoned his work with interactive television, Villareal began to pursue a more systems-based approach, devising complex light sculptures in which he combined strobe lights, neon, and most recently, LED bulbs activated by the artist's own extraordinary custom-made software. The effect of these bulbs, and the software that steers their flickering patterns, is cumulative and magical: thousands of tiny white LEDs may resemble a starry night as seen in a planetarium (Villareal installed this work in the windows of the Peter Jay Sharp Building at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), while tubes of colored LEDs masked by a diffuser give a softer effect that resembles something like a Monet painting of water lilies set in motion. This volume accompanies the first museum survey of Villareal's hypnotic and exhilarating light sculptures at the San Jose Museum of Art.
