The city is illuminated by six artists' works, some elaborate, some spare, done in a medium that everyone can understand.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published January 8, 2006
[Times photo: Melissa Lyttle]
Plant Hall at the University of Tampa was bathed in massive moving patterns of light and images while an audio track played primal chants and liturgical chorales for a 30-minute Luminographic Concert by Jorge Orta.
TAMPA - What does $1-million buy?
For Lights on Tampa, a lot.
The Tampa public art project which debuted Saturday, probably the most ambitious ever undertaken in the Tampa Bay area, was billed as an event that would bathe the downtown in light art with six large-scale installations.
Even if the other five installations had been just okay - and some, frankly, were - Luminographic Concert by Paris-based Spanish artist Jorge Orta was what both light art and public art should be: a populist spectacle.
Orta's work can be compared to the famous saffron panels hanging in New York City's Central Park last year, or the pink wraps around Miami's Key Biscayne islands in the 1980s, both by the more famous artist Christo and his wife Jean-Claude. Like them, the best light art presents us with theatrics. And like them, the artist imposes something artificial on the environment, asking us to view a familiar sight in a new way.
Plant Hall at the University of Tampa was bathed in massive moving patterns of light and images while an audio track played primal chants and liturgical chorales. The 30-minute show began with a projection of stars that dimmed as a chart of the solar system scrolled across the building, followed by ancient symbols, silhouettes of people and hands and finally a garden of neon flowers.
Orta's installation is the only one of the group that will not be repeated and, if you missed it, that's a shame, because it was the one most worth seeing. Orta designed the escalating progression of light and sound for a crowd of strangers standing together just once in the dark, connected afterwards by a collective memory. For all its intellectual and conceptual framework, Luminographic Concert had an element of sentimentality, too, something rare and optimistic in a medium that is essentially technical and cerebral.
The only other work in the group that approaches its sophistication is Fade III, Erwin Redl's massive grid of lights in the Pavilion at Rivergate Tower on Ashley Drive, up for six months, that shifts from an intense red to ghostly blue. Its visual beauty is spare and severe compared with Orta's baroque vision.
As a medium, light art is unique in that it's impossible to be ugly. No matter how confounding a work might be, light is something we all understand and respond to. And the committee choosing the works made sure some were so accessible as to be simply decorative. Stephen Knapp's Luminous Affirmations on the Municipal Office Building, a permanent installation, is a pretty cluster of light and glass that resembles a bunch of Birds of Paradise or origami flowers. In Wendy Babcox's seven-paneled video Taking Breath on the National Wall Art Gallery exterior, also on Ashley Drive, Weeki Wachee mermaids and fish swim in and out of our view through porthole-shaped frames. It will be on display for three weeks. Tobey Archer's Marquee, a permanent installation, wraps multicolored fiber optic lights around the rooflines of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. It's pretty as well, but has the impact of children's light sticks.
LuminoCity, a five-week installation by Bay Stage Lighting on the News Center, is a slickly conceived display of flashing red, white and blue spotlights punctuated by horizontal bands of light. In fairness, I did not tune into the shortwave radio station that broadcast companion music so I did not experience the work fully.
Really, though, the point is that Lights on Tampa did just what it should do: appeal to a population as broad as the color spectrum. Maybe it didn't have the draw of a Bucs game, but the streets were full of people of all ages, ethnicities and economic groups.
