Early Light Environments

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Bound 2000
Emerson Majestic Theater, Boston, MA

Scrim, metal pipe, lights
30' x 43' x 20'

Five thirty-foot high scrim fabric columns create a soaring environment for four performers from the Christine Bennett Dance Company. The sculpture shifts in color, mood and translucency in changing theater light. Dancers perform on stilts to create an eerie and elegant reflection of height, which they then contrast with the boundless physical energy of the dancers on the ground.

Light & Shadow Environment 1994
Artist's studio, Somerville, MA

Vellum, perforated metal, lights
12' x 16' x 16'

Light projects through holes in perforated metal columns, casting delicate shadow patterns onto panels of translucent paper. Shadows distort and extend the geometric shapes, creating a dynamic environment of pattern, form and light.

Pathways 1990
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA

Aluminum screen, aluminum bar, perforated metal, wood
12'9" x 22' x 44'

Viewers journey on pathways through a multi-layered environment of suspended screen panels and shadows. As people walk through the dimly lit space, they experience a sequence of continually shifting views. Industrial materials and architectural forms soften to suggest an outdoor landscape.

Dark Field 1990
Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, MA

Charcoal aluminum screen, wood, lights
9'3" x 17'4" x 25'

This mazelike environment of black screen panels contains passageways and rooms through which viewers move. Interacting with piercing light, the screens project bold moiré patterns that seem to float in front of their surface, creating a shimmering and ambiguous space.

Structure/Nonstructure 1989
LeSaffre Willstein Gallery, Boston, MA

Aluminum screen, aluminum bar, wire, lights
8' x 22' x 34'

The installation builds an ephemeral structure within the solid architecture of the gallery. Suspended screen panels cast delicate shadows onto the walls. The floor is covered with layers of screen; shifting underfoot, they create moiré patterns that look like water.

Aviary 1988
MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA

Scrim, steel pipe, cables, plexiglas, hardware, theater lights
46'6" x 61' x 62'

Sited in a four story experimental theater, this sculpture consists of five thirty-foot tall scrim columns and an overhead fabric canopy stretched on a network of cables. In changing theater light, the forms evoke stone ruins, tree trunks or a dappled forest. The multimedia performance was a collaboration with Ellen Sebring, video/sound and Sarah Skaggs, dance.

Black on Black 1987
MIT Museum, Cambridge MA

Black scrim, aluminum pipe, lights
11'3" x 19' x 43'4"

This environment was not documentable. Viewers enter a darkened room. Over time, shapes emerge from the dimness, like photographs in a developing tray. It is difficult to distinguish between the material forms -- floor-to-ceiling columns of translucent black fabric -- and the columnar voids between them. The effect is eerie, like an ancient ruin seen by moonlight. The installation engages viewers in a dialogue between what their eyes tell them and what they experience physically while moving through the space.

Antarctica 1987
First Congregational Church, Cambridge, MA

Scrim, aluminum pipe, fluorescent lights
18'11" x 43'2" x 53'10"

Fabric forms extended in light create a place reminiscent of an iceberg or a glacier. Against this starkness, performers from the Nancy Compton Dance Theater etch a kinetic and sensual exploration of the landscape.

Geometries 1987
Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA

Scrim, aluminum pipe, fluorescent lights
14' x 48' x 48'

This multilayered environment of scrim panels and forms alternately reveals and obscures itself as viewers move through it. Light-filled shapes emerge, then recede, into the foggy atmosphere.

Tepee 1986
Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA

Scrim, aluminum pipe, halogen and fluorescent lights
12' x 35' x 35'

Conical forms made of scrim fabric stretched over aluminum frames glow in the brilliant blue light. The tepees, which viewers can enter or define pathways around, evoke a forest or village.

Appearances/Disappearances 1985
Mobius, Boston, MA

Scrim, aluminum pipe, wire, lights
14' x 24' x 42'

This environment of scrim fabric panels shifts from translucent to opaque in changing light. The sculpture is a walk-through installation and a performance in which two dancers choreograph a piece based on sleep movements. Dancers appear as shadowy figures moving through the layers of scrim.

Overlay 1985
Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA

Scrim, aluminum pipe, wire, lights
12' x 35' x 35'

Scrim, a translucent cloth, forms physical barriers while allowing light to penetrate. In this minimal environment, suspended floor-to-ceiling walls of scrim fabric create rooms and corridors, lit by bare incandescent bulbs. The piece focuses attention on viewers' shifting perceptions as they move through the space.

Urban Light 1985
Limelight Club, NYC

Mirrored plexiglas strips, projectors, monofilament, wall reflections
23' x 16'6" x 44'6"

This walk-through "light forest" was exhibited in conjunction with the Urban Light Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Northeast blackout of 1965. The event was the first large scale art exhibition in a New York nightclub by a group of artists working with the medium of light.

Lightgarden 1984
Boston Visual Artists Union, MA

Mirrored plexiglas strips, projectors with red gels, reflections
12' x 24' x 40'

Mirrored strips, placed on the floor and suspended, reflect lines of light onto the walls and central column of a room. Brick walls and a wooden floor become surfaces and textures for a luminous drawing, evoking plant forms in a garden.

Lightforest 1984
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA

Mirrored plexiglas strips, monofilament, projectors, reflections
10'6" x 24' x 24' (octagonal room)

Freely suspended mirrored strips, activated by air currents and viewer movement, create an illusive forest of mirrors and whirling light. Interacting with light from two projectors, the mirrors cast linear reflections, shadows and tiny dots of light that dart around the space like fireflies.

Lightwall 1983
Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA

Mirrored plexiglas strips, computer-controlled projectors, reflections
12' x 35' x 35'

A large mirrored floor panel and a suspended mirrored panel interact with computer-controlled light to project brilliant reflected fields. Wavelike clouds of light are continually transformed by the subtle changes in light emitted by four slide projectors. In a loop of slow dissolves, the reflections evolve in color and intensity, evoking fire, clouds or an icy pond.

Mirror Light 1983
MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, MA

Mirrored plexiglas, fabric screens, lights, performers
25' x 35' x 40'

In this "living sculpture" three performers manipulate flexible mirrored strips, reflecting arcs of light onto the ceiling and walls of a space. The audience was invited to explore the sculpture, following the possibilities presented by the performance.

Grid Environment 1980
MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, MA

Wooden screens, spotlights, projectors, dimmer
25' x 35' x 40'

This environment evolved from a tiny book of paper cutouts that cast shadows as you turned its pages. Each page was enlarged into a wooden screen. These were installed in a three story white room, where they interacted with lights to fill the space with a network of overlapping shadow patterns.