lighting installation

 ‘Unwoven Lights’ & ‘Capturing Resonance’ are installations by Korean artist Soo Sunny Park. 

• Park is best known for using quotidian building materials such as insulation, dry wall, and mesh screens to create experiential installations that rely on repetition and the interplay of light and materials to sublime effect.

• For Capturing Resonance, Park has similarly transformed a ubiquitous and obdurate material – chain link fencing – into something transcendent.

• By affixing thousands of iridescent acrylic Plexiglas squares into chain link cells, Park created a sprawling, undulating structure that transmits, reflects, and refracts both the natural and artificial light into the gallery.

Capturing Resonance is hanging from the third floor ceiling, Capturing Resonance fills the narrow space. The cascading, interlocking convex and concave Plexi and chain link fence units appear as biomorphic forms, overwhelming the field of vision of each visitor as they enter the gallery. Depending on the time of day, rainbow hued shadows fill the space, shifting from crisp representations of the structure to abstract colour washes with the path of the sun. In Capturing Resonance, shifting light becomes a sculptural material and a symbol of transient physical and psychological states. 

In Capturing Resonance, Park and Topel have fused visual and sonic elements in a sensorial environment that captures the dynamic interactions between light, sound, and human presence. Transforming an already architecturally in-between space, Park and Topel filter the non-physical conditions of the site – light and movement – through sculptural and aural forms to create a site-specific and responsive architectonic installation that continually shifts and transforms in relation to perspective, time, and presence.

 

As visitors proceed through the interstitial – or in-between – space, motion sensors in the installation respond by activating different auditory ‘states’ that vary in both intensity and frequency. Layering an audio dimension onto Capturing Resonance, Topel blends whispering chords, soft tonal washes, and elongated instrumental sounds in a continuous and ever-changing composition that responds to human interaction. Depending on the number of people in the space, the musical states increase or decrease accordingly, and create a site-responsive installation. Hightech Holosonic Audio Spotlight panels and low-frequency bass exciters installed throughout the gallery, work together with the sculptural forms to create an experience of dematerialized or ethereal space. 

‘Unwoven Lights’ installation is suspended from the walls and ceiling, thirty-seven individually sculpted units are arranged as a graceful, twisting flow of abstract form. There are no coloured plexi used in the work. It is an optical illusion, depending on the intensity of light hitting the plexi and the viewer’s viewing angle, each plexi piece bounces colour differently. Unwoven Light captures light and causes it to reveal itself, through colourful reflections and refractions on the installations surfaces and on the gallery floor and walls.

Animating the gallery’s’ generous space, transforming it into a shimmering world of light, shadow, and brilliant colour. The liberty shows how both natural and artificial light change when viewed at a certain angle or at a different time of day.

The structure of chain link fencing is similar to the grid of fibres arranged horizontally and vertically on a weaving loom. However, Park uses the grid structure as a means to “unweave.” Wired into each open cell of the chain link is a cut-out shape of iridescent Plexiglas. Iridescence in nature is seen in the sheen of peacock feathers, fish scales, and butterfly wings, appearing as a myriad of colours that appear to change with the angle at which they are viewed. Here the iridescent properties of the coated Plexiglas serve to unweave light, each shape turning from clear to colourful in lights presence.

This large-scale installation utilizes the intense natural light in the gallery with the flow of museum visitors through this transitional space to create an ever-changing sculptural.