Beth Lauck contributes bi-monthly posts about emerging and disruptive design and communications trends, and helps forecast why and how these changes will affect market intelligence. She also maintains a blog devoted to the intersections between fashion, future studies and trend science. She completed an internship with Trend Union in 2012 as the Assistant Editor and Community Manager of Trend Tablet, and considers her experiences with the Trend Union team an invaluable addition to her work as a trend forecaster and fashion theorist. 

Currently on view at Rice Gallery in Houston, Texas is Soo Sunny Park’s latest installation, Unwoven Light. Rice Gallery has been transformed into a shimmering world of light, shadow, and brilliant color. Suspended from the walls and ceiling, thirty-seven individually sculpted units are arranged as a graceful, twisting flow of abstract form.

Unwoven Light continues Park’s ongoing experimentation with the ephemeral qualities of light and how light shapes our perceptions of architectural space. Though immaterial, light is a critical structural element in each of Park’s works. Here, she has utilized both the gallery’s lighting and the natural light that enters through the front glass wall. Park notes, “We don’t notice light when looking so much as we notice the things light allows us to see. Unwoven Light captures light and causes it to reveal itself, through colorful reflections and refractions on the installations surfaces and on the gallery floor and walls.”

Park employs the grid-like structure of chain link fencing to “unweave” strands of natural and artificial light. Wired into each open cell of the chain link is a cut-out shape of iridescent Plexiglas. Park explains, “Like a net, the sculpture is a filter that is meant to capture the light that is already there and force it to reveal itself. Now we can see it, the light, in purple shadows and yellow-green reflections that both mirror the shape of the fence and restructure the space they inhabit.”

Each visitor’s experience of Unwoven Light will be unique, depending upon the time of day, ratio of natural to artificial light, precise angle of viewing, and even the number of people in the gallery.

Beth Lauck

soosunnypark.com

www.ricegallery.org

Beth’s blog