6 minute read
Art Beyond Boundaries
BY PARKER ALLEN
A Conversation with Artist Adam Frelin
Adam Frelin began his artistic career as a teenager creating graffiti projects in his hometown of Grove City, Pennsylvania.
The scale and openness of creating art this way attracted him - it was art free from the restrictions of a classroom. Surely unbeknownst to him at the time, he was laying the groundwork for his future career.
In the mid 1990s, Frelin completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Art school was an informative experience, he noted, but not exactly what he was looking for. “The thing about going to school for art is they are teaching you how to make art for galleries. I got redirected, in a way. When I finished my undergrad, I was actually planning to switch and go into landscape architecture,” he explained.
But, landscape architecture wasn’t quite the right fit either. It seemed good on the surface, but the degree of his ambition and scale was a better fit for the artistic field.
His ideas were grandiose, and colleagues told him, “You’re never going to have that realized in this field.”
And so he went back to school, earning his Master of Fine Arts from University of California, San Diego.
His artwork began naturally gravitating towards creating pieces out in the landscape. His breakthrough with light came in 2005 during an artist residency on a cattle ranch in Wyoming.
He was drawn to two perfectly shaped hills on the ranch that created a symmetrical valley in between and thought, “Something needs to go between the two to bridge the gap.” The natural darkness of the ranch led him to the idea of employing lighting.
Several hundred feet of aircraft cable and 80 four-foot fluorescent lights later, White Line was born, a subtle but spectacular bowing line of light that bridged the valley between the two hills.
“In this darkened, dramatic landscape, here was this illuminated element that did two things. It drew attention to itself, but it also drew attention to everything around it,” said Frelin. The fluorescent light outdoors was reminiscent of moonlight, and the piece created an amazing play of light and shadow on the surrounding landscape. “It was both a thing to look at and an effect machine, in a way.”
From that point forward, light became an integral part of his artistic repertoire. “I am not strictly a light artist,” he clarified, “but it is an important part of my work, and it seems to be the work that I get a lot of attention for now.” He uses it as a tool to create a particular effect that functions metaphorically to draw attention to a place or an issue.
The best example of this was a 2016 project called Breathing Lights, a multi-city installation in the Capital District of New York. Bloomberg Philanthropies was looking to fund projects that drew attention to civic concerns. In a meeting with a local architect and the deputy mayor of Troy, Frelin asked, “What is the specific concern or idea this could be about?” They both simply responded, “Vacancy.”
Frelin wanted to incorporate the vacant buildings in the installation itself. Architect Barbara Nelson, his partner on the project, suggested using light. Frelin loved the idea, but remembers thinking that the light can’t be solid – that would just give the appearance that the vacant buildings are occupied. It has to change in some way.
And so he and his team created thousands of LED light boxes, spread across 200 buildings, that slowly “breathed,” waxing on and off. The breathing lights spoke to an “underlying life force that was beneath the entire region, as if the life force was coming out in these particular nodes of the abandoned buildings.”
Many of his pieces, like Breathing Lights, have an underlying story to tell – they touch on some relevant socioeconomic issue. Other pieces don’t necessarily address a pressing issue but nonetheless connect with the local environment and resonate with the people there. A great example is Extended Sunset at Penn State University.
“I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I know that it can be pretty dreary in the winter,” Frelin explained. He took an image of a sunset taken in that location and had it printed on film that was put in the windows of an auditorium. The windows were lined with LED strips, and the entire thing was hooked up to an astronomical timer so that it turned on at dusk and stayed on all night. “It was a sunset for everyone who doesn’t get to see sunsets there.”
Frelin is constantly seeking out new artistic opportunities and currently has several projects in the works. As for incorporating light, he usually lets the project details dictate the direction in which he goes. The use of light is an artistic tool he has developed over the last two decades, and, like any master of his craft, he knows when and where to use it.
The thing that excites him the most nowadays are different festivals that happen around the world, like a recent lantern festival he attended in Japan. He finds inspiration in the objects and props he sees and in how they become an integral part of a much a larger experience.
“As an artist,” he explained, “you are often taught to make things in seclusion that are then put in a specific place for the initiated. How do you create something that is part of larger, enriching experience that affects people who aren’t necessarily seeking art out?”
That is the question that drives Frelin to create beautiful works of art that can be experienced by everyone.
To learn more about Adam Frelin and his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram
