Seeking enlightenment

Sep. 22—Artist Leo Villareal had no instruction manual to create the lighting arrays he saw in his mind. So he had to build his own.

Villareal, who has created massive light art installations for bridges in San Francisco and London, came to Santa Fe this year with a more intimate assignment.

The goal was to build a light array to beckon people to the brand-new Vladem Contemporary Museum of Art that would run 24 hours a day in perpetuity.

The resulting light sculpture, Astral Array, illuminates an outdoor passageway measuring 33 feet wide by 38 feet long that incorporates more than 2,500 LED lights into mirrored steel channels mounted to the ceiling.

It's built to last; it has a backup computer in case the first one shorts out, and he's trained an art steward at the museum to maintain it.

"It is using technology, but it's made to the highest standard with the best engineers to be as robust as possible," Villareal says. "And then there's a very detailed manual. We do everything we can to try and ensure that the pieces will run as intended. My studio is always involved, but it's quite a distance from Brooklyn to Santa Fe, and I think we've set them up in a way that they feel comfortable."

For Villareal, born in Albuquerque and raised in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the project represents a merging of his worlds. He grew up on both sides of the border around El Paso, and his artistic sensibilities didn't emerge until he went to boarding school at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island.

There, he says, he was exposed to museums and arts classes he didn't really have experience with back home, and he began contemplating a career in set design. Villareal went to Yale University where he took an installation sculpture class that changed his life forever.

"I was always interested in light," he says, three decades later. "But then after college, I became aware of the work of James Turrell and Dan Flavin and some of the light and space artists. They were really inspiring to me, and I also had always been interested in computers. My dad got me an Apple II Plus when I was 13 years old; you really couldn't do much creatively with the computer at that point. But 1990, when I graduated from college, is the year Photoshop came out for the first time. Suddenly you can edit images on a computer for the first time."

Villareal enrolled in a two-year graduate program at New York University where he started programming 3D graphics, and a couple years later he went to California to work for a nascent research lab started by Microsoft co-founder (and former Albuquerquean) Paul Allen.

The artist says he thought he'd be there three months but stayed three years. He joined the research staff and began studying the tremendous potential of connecting software and light. He returned to New York in 1997, established his studio the following year, and has been working with custom software ever since.

"I'm definitely artist first," he says. "I use a lot of technology, but I quickly exceeded my abilities as a coder. So I've had to find creative coders to work with over the years. ... I'm really inspired by things in science and math. I would not say it's my forte, but I'm able to approach these things in the tools I create, and I use these systems to create my work."

For The Bay Lights, Villareal's most monumental work, the artist lined 1.8 miles of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge with LED lights with changing patterns. He says it took more than two-and-a-half years to go from conception to completion, and it illuminated one of America's most picturesque cities from March 5, 2013, to March 5, 2023.

The LED lights, Villareal says, can last 100,000 hours, or 11.5 years, burning at full power without stopping. That ability to last is crucial — he does not want to have to change 25,000 light bulbs on top of a bridge.

"We estimated for The Bay Lights that it would use less than $30 a night in electricity," he says. "That's for 25,000 lights. So it's pretty remarkable how little energy it uses. That is a huge concern of mine. I really want to be aware of the way we're using resources. And in the case of The Bay Lights, we did an offset. We did this solar project that is not literally driving the bridge, but it is creating energy and trying to offset what we're using there."

Villareal's project to illuminate nine bridges in central London, Illuminated River, is scheduled to last at least a decade. Some of those bridges are monochromatic, he says, while others are lit up in colors. His other projects have taken him all over the world, from American museums from New York to California to installations in South Korea and New Zealand. His gigantic installation titled Volume (Frisco) is a focal point of the Dallas Cowboys' headquarters and practice facility.

"For me, it's not all about scale," he says. "It's interesting to work on these huge projects that tens or hundreds of millions of people will see, but I also find it very exciting to do more intimate scale pieces. Either way, I might learn something on The Bay Bridge and then apply to a smaller artwork or vice-versa. It's all a continuum. I feel very lucky to be able to work."

In some cases, he works with manufacturers or engineers to create fixtures for his lights. His Vladem installation, Astral Array, will be grayscale, and he designed it to correspond to the stars and celestial bodies. He programmed it on-site where there are elements of watching the clouds and sunsets. But Astral Array is designed to cycle through animations, and Villareal says even he's not sure what may come up next.

"You might recognize certain motifs, but you never see the exact same progression twice because there are many different things occurring simultaneously," he says. "They're all randomized. It's not generative; it's not making new things I've never seen before. I've seen all the different permutations of what it can do. But I have no idea which pattern is going to come up next or which combinations of sequences.

"The layering to me is very interesting and gives the piece another sense of magic. I want people to be able to spend a lot of time with the work and feel like it maintains a sense of mystery. It's not like it's a three-minute loop, and it does it again and again. Because it's abstract and open-ended, it's going to be highly subjective. Each person who looks at it will have their own interpretation."

The array will be muted late at night but will always be visible to people walking between Guadalupe and the Railyard. Villareal says he hopes it beckons people into the museum, like moths to flame. The lights, layered and filtered, are meant to evoke familiar and also inscrutable patterns.

"I take inspiration from things I see in nature," Villareal says. "I'm interested in how things work, but I'm not using a photographic or filmic technique of sampling, like using a camera. I'm trying to re-create things using code. And I'm boiling things down like, 'How does water oscillate?' I'm taking inspiration from a sunset or movement of water or things you might see in the cosmos or the symmetry of a flower. ... And once you understand those rules, I start to play with those rules to create new things with my own convention. But I think it triggers a lot of the same responses that we have as humans when we see light and some of these things that create a sense of awe and wonder."

So what does it mean to design for posterity? Villareal says Astral Array would continuously last about 11.5 years, but he expects the Vladem installation to endure longer than that. He opens a piece in October at a new performing arts center for Brown University in Rhode Island and is working on a project in Tokyo that will open at a future date. He's busy, and his work is all over the world — and sometimes that's surprising to him.

"If someone had shown me pictures of these things 20 years ago, I never would've believed it," he says. "But one thing leads to another, and you're on this path as an artist. I love moments of discovery and experimentation. That's really what my work is all about, so I'm constantly learning and excited to be in all kinds of places and make work that has a universal quality. It doesn't matter what language you speak; we all are connected fundamentally in a very primal way to light, and it's interesting to see how that works across cultures."