By Gwendolyn Holbrow

Let there be light: at this time of year, it becomes a plea rather than a command. Fortunately for New Englanders, an antidote to the short dark days of December is at hand, provided by regional artists who express themselves through light, using everything from high-powered lasers and video projectors to tiny glowing LEDs and candles.

For millennia, light has served as a metaphor for knowledge. Even the blind say, “I see,” meaning, “I understand.” And when we achieve new understanding, what do we call it? Illumination, or enlightenment. Cambridge media designer David Small specializes in the creative presentation of information, and he elegantly conveys this connection between light and knowledge in the fountain for the new Hall of Ideas at the Mary Baker Eddy Library, and in his Illuminated Manuscript, commissioned for Dokumenta 2002. 

The fountain, a collaboration with the library’s creative team and sculptor Howard Ben Tre, is a “fountain of wisdom,” says Exhibits Manager Heather Zurlo, one of the originators of the concept. Along with water, letters bubble up out of the center, stream across the surface, and spill away at the edges, and as the type flows it gathers into words. Infrared sensors at the fountain’s base detect the presence of viewers and adjust the flow to respond to their positions via movable mirrors attached to the five projectors mounted overhead and networked with five separate computers. The words then reappear on the floor, swirling across the stone and up the wall, to screens where they resolve into one of 800 quotes representing the power of ideas. The meditative pacing invites adults to sit in contemplation, while younger visitors chase the letters as they swim around the hall.

“We do mostly commercial work, with a little bit of art, which mostly means not getting paid,” explains Small, who holds three degrees from MIT. Illuminated Manuscript, whose software uses some of the same algorithms as the fountain, falls into the art category. A hand-bound book with blank white pages rests on a white lectern in a white room. A video projector casts type onto the pages, beginning with four essays on the subject of freedom, and sensors in the pages detect page turns and the reader’s hand movements, causing the text to change in response to motion. “It’s sort of a meditation on the nature of the book, and where we’re going with technology,” says Small, and it suggests how the meaning of a text varies with reader and circumstance. Illuminated Manuscript is on display at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, until February 15. In April it will come to the Judy Rotenberg Gallery in Boston, with another Small piece, Talmud Project, as part of the exhibit Words on Fire.

Another MIT graduate, sculptor Beth Galston, currently incorporates light into her work on a more intimate scale, capturing rather than projecting it. Over the past twenty years she has created a large body of light installations, and another of perforated metal outdoor sculpture that manipulates natural light and shadow. For several years in the mid-90s, she worked mainly with natural materials like leaves and seedpods, and her work appeared not to be about light. Then, when she discovered translucent resin in 1998, “I felt I had found my way back to light.”

Galston began by embedding leaves, acorns and other natural materials in the resin, but was dissatisfied with their limitations of form and color. The next step was to make molds and cast the objects in resin. One result is her Ice Forest, an installation of icy-looking rose stems suspended like matrix of stalactites from her studio ceiling. Another result is heaps of transparent acorns, piled like the hoards of cold and ghostly squirrels. And a third result is a question: how best to illuminate this material? From within, Galston decided, and started embedding LEDs.

Now tiny shimmering pink and red acorns climb the wall, grounded by their root-like wires. Pale blue pods bob like heavy flower heads atop tall straight wires. And a clear prickly chestnut burr rests pregnantly in its own eerie blue glow. “In this work there are references to things we’ve seen in the outside world, ordinary things that have been transformed,” says Galston. She envisions the pieces multiplied and scaled up into an environment, with “dots of light of light all over the room, and being able to walk through it, and some movement…” To see where this process leads Galston, visit her April exhibit at the Groton School’s Christopher Brodigan Gallery in Groton, MA.

In Wayne Strattman’s work, light might represent thought, emotion, speech, or life, or simply move in abstract or chaotic patterns. His high-tech studio is located in the Piano Factory on Tremont Street, and if you’ve ever noticed the blue neon sign for The Piano Factory Gallery in the window, you’ve seen one of his very early pieces.

The studio is equipped with massive kilns, glass lathe, mass spectrometer, vacuum coating chamber and other sophisticated machinery. With plates, globes and tubes of colored light flickering and glowing everywhere, it could easily pass for a mad scientist’s laboratory. Hollow glass hands lie on the counter. A fully operational orange neon beer mug sits glowing on its electrical coaster, then blinks off when you lift it in your hand. Although Strattman does research consulting, including development work for Corning, his special lighting effects are so popular with the movie industry, science museums, and nightclubs that they now support the consulting business.

In addition to electrical novelties, however, Strattman applies his technological wizardry to more personal exploration. His struggle with medical problems is movingly expressed in two handmade incandescent bulbs. Each is a glass tube about four inches in diameter and a foot long, hung one above the other. The filament in the upper bulb is bent into cursive script spelling “anger;” the lower one says “depression.” Frayed vintage electrical cords lead to the switches that make them light alternately, one brightening as the other dims: a cycle painfully familiar to many.

Another more light-hearted piece, Chasing Ideas, plays off the classic cartoon signifier for “idea.” With impressive technique, Strattman has opened holes in several actual light bulbs, connected them with glass tubes, filled the whole with krypton gas and applied an electrical current, causing a stream of white light to flow through the series of bulbs.

Not sure it’s art? Strattman is used to that, and he addresses the issue in another piece, Still Empty. This time white light flows from a clear hollow faucet down into a glass that never becomes full. It’s a description of his attempts to have his work accepted as fine art. “Even though people are amazed by it, they still don’t take it seriously,” he says. ”This is my personal statement.”

Like David Small, Mitch Rosenberg uses video projection, but to grittier effect, stating, “I just don’t have a glossy esthetic.” Guerilla projection has been a specialty of his, including the projection of an open wound on a medical building, or more recently a video protesting the gentrification of South Boston, which he projected onto the four-story Necco Street overpass. Do the owners object? “It’s only light,” Rosenberg says. “It’s funny, it can leave a longer impression than graffiti, even though graffiti is a more permanent mark.” For him, light’s appeal is its ability to take art out of the gallery to larger audience.

Rosenberg also likes to cross technology with nature, as in the robotic video installation he created for the 1999 Cyber Arts Festival. A celebration of both natural and artificial light, a video of sunlight reflecting off rippling water was projected onto a mirror held by a rotating robotic arm. This reflected the projected light onto a burning candle, other projections and the walls of the space. More recently he produced a video installation for Medicine Wheel 2000, the annual vigil in honor of World AIDS Day. He recorded interviews with people affected by AIDS, then projected these, interspersed with other images, onto a low mound of stones. Planted in a circle around the stones, small speakers murmured their stories, giving the impression that the earth could speak. Steaming Video has been perhaps his most ambitious piece, in which he projected videos of fire and water onto a 20-foot-wide swath of steam rising 50 feet into the air. Commissioned for First Night 2000, it was unfortunately never installed due to siting problems, but it had a spectacular dress rehearsal at Fort Point.

In addition to abstract work and political commentary, Rosenberg does commercial video engineering for his bread and butter. His current project, in collaboration with disabled performer Keith Jones, is a combination, a music video that comments on being black and disabled in America, and he’s hoping it will be his crossover hit. “I have little interest in art where one person plunks their work on a gallery wall,” states Rosenberg. “For me a good artwork has a larger meaning and an effect, and people can come into it and have some kind of role or interest.” 

If you prefer your light artwork raw, and like to come into it and have some kind of role, consider a visit to the Asylum in Springfield, where True Lasers and Tranz TV videographers of Connecticut strut their stuff at twice-monthly raves. The lasers are spectacular, brilliant and mesmerizing, At this venue, True Lasers uses two blue-green argon lasers and one full-spectrum laser, throwing beams, sheets, and tunnels of light in dancing geometric patters through an artificially haze. Laser animation and text are also projected onto screens, picked up by the video cameras and added to the video mix.

“We started in 1995, in high school, with a laser pointer and a mirror ball,” says Austin ­Bulkeley. “We played with it and wondered if we could do more.” Some of their later lasers were converted from old medical devices and cell sorters. “We take old lasers and give them new life, for visual stimulation,” adds partner Chad Rogers. Now they have eleven lasers, and, in association with Trans TV, they do indoor and outdoor events for corporate clients, colleges, nightclubs, high schools, music videos, weddings and private parties.

Trans TV began as a cable access show: John Michalman and Troy Peterson, friends since they were six years old, started taping live in nightclubs, mixed in some graphics, and broadcast a one-hour show. Popular demand brought them into the clubs, and now they sit on stage at the Asylum, running several cameras, a bank of seven monitors with live video of the DJ, the lasers and the crowd, computer graphics, 3-D animation, and a mixer. They blend and multiply the images, add special effects, and project the results on multiple screens throughout the cavernous space.

The building and the crowd contribute light as well. Conventional theatrical lights and black lights shine on stage and crowd; red and yellow lenses rotate on a central ceiling globe, marquis lights stream along the walls and around the doorways. The flashing red navel inserts and whirling yellow, green and purple glow sticks of the dancers complete the scene. With throbbing music, pulsing lights and writhing bodies, the effect is Wagnerian, a Gesamtkunstwerk, though admittedly with less narrative drive.

Like other artists using expensive and complicated technology, True Lasers and Tranz TV support themselves with commercial work and then play with the equipment on their own time. “The best is when we do it outdoors when it rains. It catches every raindrop,” says Michalman, describing one magical laser experience. They set the laser to skim across the grass at night, and beamed a circle of light through the rain toward the tent entrance. “It looked like the grass was on fire. You could walk right into that tunnel of light.”

Folk cultures also illuminate the winter darkness, from the bonfires and Yule logs of ancient times to the ubiquitous glowing snowmen and dangling icicle lights of today. Somerville is home to some masters of this art, and every December the Somerville Arts Council sponsors sold-out trolley tours of the most decorated streets. For a private viewing, Program Manager Rachel Strutt recommends a stroll down Springfield Street, citing number 53 as perhaps the most spectacular.

Here Jerry Carvalho carries on a tradition begun by his father half a century ago. He outlines the triple-decker with lights and fills an enormous crčche with evergreen boughs, hay, a manger and 15 glowing figures. His father, now in his 80’s, directs the installation, relegating secular Santa and reindeer to a side wall. With the twinkling lights for the eye, Christmas music for the ear, and the smells of hay and pine to delight the nose, this is a Gesamtkunstwerk of another kind. It’s a lot of work, says Carvalho, but “As I’m doing it, people walk by and say, ‘Thank God you’re doing it again this year.’ It ends up being a ritual for a lot of people.”

Finally, if further light therapy is needed, stop by Boston’s First Night Celebration and bask in the glow of light sculptor Bob Harmon’s 14-foot high double-sided light painting, on display on Boston Common, December 31, 1 pm–midnight. Hang around long enough and you’ll catch two firework displays, the first at 7:10 pm, the second at midnight, for a dazzling entry into 2003.

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