Light Nelson preview leaves big crowd beaming
Abstract, surreal, entertaining – sometimes all at once – punters were no doubt left a little brighter after Light Nelson welcomed its first wave of visitors.
The biennial outdoor event opened to the public yesterday, with 66 light installations along a oneway walking trail through Queens Gardens, Albion Square and the NMIT campus.
The free festival attracted more than 55,000 visitors in 2016. Hopes of surpassing that number this year look likely, judging by the long queue outside the Queens Gardens entrance during Thursday night’s preview event.
Led by the Light Bulb Men, hundreds were taken through a labyrinth of colour and light artistry, encountering everything from a storytelling clothesline to a Haast’s eagle nest, a whale in the duck pond and – courtesy of film-maker Vincent Ward’s film projection Kin/ Kaitiaki – a horse and a naked man on a small-town New Zealand street.
Back for his third Light Nelson, Jon Baxter and his Perceptual Engineering crew didn’t mind people walking in front of their projection piece A Trip Into The Nature Of Being – it actually enhances the work.
Using digital mapping and smoke machines to illuminate the NMIT B Block building, passersby were encouraged to stand in front of the projection light to create a silhouette effect.
Sure to be a favourite with the masses are the collective’s two separate works inside the Hangshui Chinese Garden.
Pentakis features lasers shooting off a 20-sided hanging ball. Baxter said the work debuted at the Splore Arts and Music Festival in February and would be used on a nationwide tour by Nelson-born composer Rhian Sheehan.
‘‘It was really my introduction to working with lasers and how much fun it was to move them up and down a mirror ball – so then we started experimenting with triangles, and it just grew and grew and grew,’’ Baxter said.
More hands-on is the Boin Boing Gloop Machines installation, featuring Kinect cameras inside drums which read the height of the lycra skin as a rope is pulled. As the height of the lycra changes, so do the sounds and visuals.
For younger visitors, the interactive displays of Larisse Hall’s Let’s Dance or Delainy Kennedy’s Reflection Perception provided more than enough stimulation before bedtime.
While creating his own ghostly likeness at the latter installation kept 5-year-old Angus Dunlop occupied, the lit-up Queens Gardens fountain and Pentakis were also highlights.
‘‘We’ve been to three of these now – we first brought Gus when he was just a baby – and he’s still loving it,’’ said his mother, Brodie Plum.
Light Nelson will continue until Tuesday July 10, open to the public between 5.30pm and 9.30pm. A map is available at www.lightnelson event.co.nz/map-2018/.