Dancing lights
Jen Lewin's interactive `Aqueous' illuminates OKC outside Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center
Once the golden hues of the Oklahoma sunset faded to deep blue twilight, the vivid shades of pink, red, orange, purple, blue and green began to flash under the feet of adults and children frolicking in Campbell Art Park.
Since opening last month outside the new Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center, New York City-based artist Jen Lewin's light installation “Aqueous” has beckoned people to stroll, dance or play along its winding interactive pathways — and hundreds have accepted the invitation.
“It is a joy to experience. I personally have enjoyed just watching people engage with it and the smiles, the laughter, the joy. It's beautiful to see, particularly in a time like this,” said Oklahoma Contemporary Artistic Director Jeremiah Matthew Davis.
“To me there's perhaps no better artwork built for a pandemic: It's installed outside, it is interactive but you interact with it with your feet, it's huge so there's plenty of space for people to enjoy and experience it.”
Part of the inaugural “Bright Golden Haze” exhibition on view inside Oklahoma Contemporary's new 54,000-square-foot home on Automobile Alley, “Aqueous” reflects the sky, the audience and the surrounding environment during the day, much like the building's “Folding Light” concept designed by Oklahoma City's Rand Elliott Architects.
At night, though, is when Lewin's cleverly engineered pathway really shines.
“I wanted to create this environment that inspires the playing of games and inspires people to ... collaborate and participate with others. Really, that's the core kind of sentiment for my part, and I'm creating this light environment that can sort of explore that,” Lewin said in a phone interview from her Brooklyn studio.
“I'm originally a dancer and I wanted to dance with people. I didn't want to just make a stagnant sculpture. I wanted to
make a sculpture that danced and people danced with.”
Interactive art
When Lewin attended college at the University of Colorado, she was presented a choice: engineering school or art school. She decided to study architecture so she could take classes from both.
“For me, the process of art is very much
integrated with engineering. I don't feel like there's a line between them” Lewin said.
“It's not a small technical endeavor with electronics that people jump on. There are very few things that we have that are electronic devices that survive jumping or rain. ... I liken it to a little bit like ballet when the ballerina gracefully jumps and dances across the stage. It's pretty hard. It's pretty hard to make work like that.”
Among her first interactive sculptures were giant butterflies that used robotics and motion to entice people to dance with them. But she said technical boundaries and maintenance issues nudged her down a different path.
“I started playing with interactive sound. ... I've been making laser harps now for over 20 years. I make these huge laser harp sculptures where you pass your hands through light beams and you create sound. You could really see the dancer in me coming out in that ... and then that started this kind of association with using light to make interaction. That sent me down a many-year pathway of building these large lightworks and then really honestly building light technology. One of the things that's unusual about me is that it's all built in-house and invented. None of it came from anyone else,” she said.
She and her small studio team build permanent artworks as well as temporary installations like “Aqueous.”
“We call it `Have Sculpture Will Travel.' ... All the temporary work is really designed to go in any landscape in anyplace. It's all very modular in the sense that I can change any installation so it's unique. But really the soul of the piece is to be able to in the same year go to Bahrain, go to Hong Kong, go to Oklahoma, go to London. Each installation is slightly different and on different landscapes ... but really that's
the goal of that piece is to be able to move around the world and meet different communities,” she said.
Delayed joy
Due to the coronavirus, she wasn't able to travel to Oklahoma for the installation of “Aqueous,” which was
originally slated for April but was pushed to August because of the pandemic.
“For me not to have been out there for an exhibit of this size is actually pretty painful to be honest,” Lewin said. “It's been very challenging to deal with these very dynamic sculptures that require really calibrating them to the local site from a
distance.”
Oklahoma Contemporary's Thursday Night Late series will feature a 7 p.m. streaming talk with Lewin at www.facebook.com/ OklahomaContemporary.
“Often, her works, though fun and engaging, also have a lot of thought and theory built into them,” Davis said.
“Her studio has cranked out a number of dynamic, really interesting and engaging works — with `Aqueous' being one of them — and we're thrilled that she was able to redesign the layout so we're presenting a unique orientation of the sculpture.”
“Aqueous” will be on view through Oct. 19. Oklahoma Contemporary started last month offering limited public access to its new home. Five people are allowed to enter the building every half-hour, advance reservations are required, and masks must be worn by everyone older than 3.
That means visitors can see the rest of “Bright Golden Haze,” which spotlights contemporary works exploring the medium and manifestations of light. Lewin's “Aqueous” is an ideal fit.
“I grew up in a place in Hawaii actually halfway up a volcano, and it's a place where the clouds would come in at eye level almost every day. You'd have these incredible lighting effects with like streams of light coming through the clouds reflecting out over the Pacific Ocean. It resembles so much the colors and the patterns and the luminosity and the reflective quality of my work,” Lewin said. “I spent so much of my childhood just staring out at this reflective beautiful ocean with these epic light effects that there's just no way as an artist I wasn't going to bring that into my work. ... And then I want to use that to make people dance.”