Jim Campbell: Scattered Light at Madison Square Park
For more than two decades Jim Campbell has been exploring the outer edges of "new media" in his installations (a moving target, to be sure), drawing as much from his time spent at MIT getting degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics as from his acute artistic and aesthetic sensibilities. Now Campbell brings his considerable talents to what has become one of the great stages for public art in New York City, the always welcoming and lovely (yes, even in winter!) Madison Square Park.
Scattered Light is Campbell's most ambitious work to date: three separate installations spread throughout the park, each somehow integrating light with the surrounding city. The centerpiece of the exhibition, also called Scattered Light and hung in the park's center lawn, is a true jaw-dropper: nearly 2,000 LEDs enclosed within standard-looking household bulbs--that adds up to an 80-foot-wide by 20 foot-high screen of hanging, swaying bulbs--onto which are "projected" what appears to be the shadows of passersby. Our camera isn't speedy enough capture the effect but trust us, it's more than a little cool.
Scattered Light is clearly the highlight here (so to speak), but the two other pieces are also interesting and fun. Broken Window, near the park's entrance at 23rd and Fifth, is a glass wall made from massive bricks, filled with LEDs, and emanating what feels like a sort of ghostly movie of the day's bustle through the bushes over on Fifth--taxis speed by, pedestrians rush to whatever was so important at the time. And on the other side of the Madison Square Park, on the small lawn near Madison Avenue, Campbell has buried LEDs in the ground, encased in two dozen glass boxes, the pulsating light making good on the promise of the piece's title (in a poetic, rather than literal, way), Voices In the Subway Station.
Jim Campbell's Scattered Light will be on display in Madison Square Park from now through February of 2011. For more information on the piece, and the artist, and the park in general, including more photographs, please see the Madison Square Park website, here.
Posted at 08:35PM Nov 01, 2010 by Scott in 10010 |