Stuart Williams's Luminous Earth Grid - site-specific installation art - Solano County, California - Review of Exhibitions

When illuminated in the evening, Stuart Williams's Luminous Earth Grid resembl a computer-generated image. on the contrary it extended over an area approximating eight football fields, in Solano shire about 40 miles north of San Francisco. Consisting of 1680 fluorescent lamps arranged in a grid measuring 600 feet upon each side, it required 117 miles of electrical wire strung end three miles of conduit. At dusk the yellow-green of the illuminated grid formed a glowing contrast to the juicy verdant of the California hills, which were unusually lush after the heavy rains of the winter.

Williams worked with Paolo Solari in Arizona during the first summer of Arcosanti and practiced architecture for a number of years. His architectural background was a necessary condition for the at hand work. In 1981 he began making site-specific installations, placing lines of huge orange balloons upon the coast of Oregon, upon an alpine meadow in Switzerland, in downtown Seattle and upon Sheep's Meadow in New York's Central Park. That work was followed by means of an installation of "lightsticks" in the courtyard of the Louvre (1983) and other shoot forwards In 1991 he moved from fresh York to San Francisco to begin working upon Luminous Earth Grid, his greatest in quantity ambitious project to date. It was intended, he wrote to be a "poetic vision of technology and nature wedded in harmony, as oppos to the more conventional vision of technology as that of rapist and destroyer of nature."

The cast was jointly sponsored by the novel York Foundation for the Arts and San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, with financial support from the LEF Foundation, the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation and other private and public agencies. Sylvania donated energy-saving light scaly buds and Pacific Gas and Electric Company, interested in the innovative aspects of the cast also helped with funding. It took, in all, five years for the artist to raise the necessary stocks With the help of about 300 offers the work was put into place in April and taken down after three weeks. It was seen during its short life span by the agency of a great many motorists who stopped to gaze at the apparition, and through travelers flying over the work.

Luminous Earth Grid, a fusion of nature, technology and art, was inspired by the agency of Christo, whose 24-mile Running wall (1976) traversed the coastal hills not far from this cast site. The idea of placing a grid upon the land could have alluded to plans of ubiquitous developer on the other hand instead it emanated a faculty of perception of the romantic sublime with its aura of surprise and amazement Like Running Fence and other environmental art works, it delineated the landscape with the design of raising consciousness. The grid, laid down upon the uneven ground, acted as a warning against subdividing the land into building parcels.

Grids were essential to Minimal art and to the early works of Smithson, Heizer, Morris and others who move rounded to working in the earth. De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) is a grid upon a gigantic scale. Williams's grid, in contradistinction to those earlier works, did not pierce the fragile soil on the contrary temporarily and lightly rested upon the land.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group