Betty Rieckmann stands in front of her light installation, A Morphing Frank Stella. Images courtesy the artist
Betty Rieckmann’s artistic tribute A Morphing Frank Stella, imbues the painter's famed, monochromatic Concentric Squares series with movement and light. With slowly changing color combinations, her Rieckmann's installation pushes Stella’s concept into the kinetic realm, combining own belief that “light is the purest form of visual art” with Stella’s ideas about the square’s “numbing power” and “humbling effects.”
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Rieckmann describes that, in her pursuit to realize her “light picture,” she saw that her work required a three-dimensional form. At this point, she sought inspiration from the revolutionary colored light rooms of James Turrell. “[Turrell’s] rooms lost their three-dimensional form and appeared to be like a colored canvas,” Rieckmann explains, in the project's description. “I am using this phenomenon on every tier of my project, thereby losing the depth perception and making the sculpture look like a picture.”
A morphing Frank Stella, light installation by Betty Rieckmann from Betty Rieckmann on Vimeo.Through this mashup of artistic influence, A Morphing Frank Stella highlights the beautiful, illusory natures of geometry when combined with light, but the element which truly makes Stella’s chromatic squares “come alive” in Rieckmann’s project is the transience of color. “By choosing certain color combinations,” she says, “the different frames of the project leap into the foreground or the background (red will jump into the foreground, blue will jump into the back ground).”
Images of A Morphing Frank Stella, 2014
Since her first exhibition in 2007, Rieckmann has experimented with a medley of light art pursuits. In 2013, Rieckmann’s work for Light Move Festival in Poland bestowed her viewers with a passport to the Life Inside An Armadillo, constructed from 3,500 PE globes and 500 LED lights inside stainless steel sheets, and a trip through to her Lollipop Worlds, a collection of colorful globes that transformed each night into “semi-translucent planets.” In addition, earlier this year, the artist dabbled in the Platonic theories of ‘completeness’ in her Seeking The White sculpture, paid homage to lives lost at sea with Morse coded ‘buoy lights’ for her Silent Communications installation, and fabricated aluminum illusions in her Embodiment of Brilliance for LED manufacturer, Lumitronix.
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Since her first exhibition in 2007, Rieckmann has experimented with a medley of light art pursuits. In 2013, Rieckmann’s work for Light Move Festival in Poland bestowed her viewers with a passport to the Life Inside An Armadillo, constructed from 3,500 PE globes and 500 LED lights inside stainless steel sheets, and a trip through to her Lollipop Worlds, a collection of colorful globes that transformed each night into “semi-translucent planets.” In addition, earlier this year, the artist dabbled in the Platonic theories of ‘completeness’ in her Seeking The White sculpture, paid homage to lives lost at sea with Morse coded ‘buoy lights’ for her Silent Communications installation, and fabricated aluminum illusions in her Embodiment of Brilliance for LED manufacturer, Lumitronix.
With the sponsorship of LED-Studien and the help of videographer Richard Dahlman and programmer Michael Helmbrecht, Reickmann's most recent project can be seen on Vimeo and for more of her work, visit the artist’s website.Related:Luminous Light Tunnels Create Illusions of Infinity[Premiere] Gaze into a Next-Level Kaleidoscope for the Digital AgeMirrored Light Sculpture Probes The Cosmic Mysteries Of GeometryEnvision The Fourth Dimension Inside This LED Hypercube
