Painted Light

Research output: Non-textual formCommissioned or Visual ArtworkResearch

Abstract

Research Background
Painted Light is a major public artwork commissioned for the $38.5 million redevelopment of the Geelong Performing Art Centre (GPAC). The animated light installation responds to the commissioning criteria for a work that creates a ‘memorable engagement’ with the new GPAC building and conveys a sense of the ‘dynamic and emerging culture of Geelong and its region’. Using programmable LED lights to present a large-scale ‘painted video’ that reveals itself over time, the work combines three of the artist’s long-standing research interests – light, paint and video – and presents them in an architectural context.

Research Contribution
Von Sturmer capitalised on advances in LED technology to translate videos of dripping paint into large-scale sequences of light. The digital rivulets of brightly-hued paint cascade down the side of the building, melding and evolving into abstracted and mesmerising planes of luminescent colour. Painted Light plays on the theatrical and powerful effects of the luminous field. The work amplifies the fluid, dynamic quality of liquid paint, to contrast the steady micro-moments of the painting’s evolving form against the rhythms of the streetscape below, and the static icon of the building itself. Contributing to research in the field of the moving image, lighting technology and art Painted Light extends the possibilities of mapping video to intelligent lighting array’s with sensitivity to context and meaning.

Research Significance
Situated on one of Geelong’s main thoroughfares, Painted Light acts as a place maker for the redeveloped centre and as a marker for the Geelong Cultural Precinct. The work is a spectacular feature of the 463sqm eastern façade and offers engagement from multiple viewpoints and long distances. Von Sturmer was awarded the Victorian Government commission from a field of 63 national and international proposals. Victorian Government Architect, Jill Garner, described the work as a “striking yet elegantly simple artwork skilfully integrated into the design for the GPAC building.”
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationGeelong, Vic, Australia
PublisherGeelong Arts Centre
Sizeapprox 10 m x 20 m
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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