Photo courtesy of the artist
The Range Of Light
In 2018, the folks behind Session Climbing approached Rite Guy about fulfilling their 1% for the Arts public art commission, for the City of Santa Rosa, in conjunction with their newly constructed building. The opportunity allowed me to expand the form language I use for ‘natural world’ centric topics in Neon. It’s a great honor to create a piece so close to the HWY 101 and HWY 12 freeways, where it is visible to so many residents of the Santa Rosa and Sonoma area.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Photo by Grace Sager
Photo by Grace Sager
ARTIST STATEMENT
This art installation is a sculpture titled ‘The Range Of Light’. It is made of custom fabricated Neon Signage Tubing, hand bent to the Artist’s spec in the traditional manner by Ames Palms of Rebel Neon in San Francisco, CA. It will be installed on the North exterior wall of the Session Climbing Gym building at 965 South A Street, next to Highway 101, in Santa Rosa CA.
‘The Range Of Light’ is a conceptual piece rooted in an exploration of advertising culture and how it can be subverted to bring attention to the environmental challenges of our time. The sculpture is meant to reference the light reflections of a mountain landscape, as can be experienced in the Sierra Nevada. The title and inspiration for the piece comes from a well known John Muir quote:
“Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine … And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.”
— from The Yosemite (1912)
The piece continues the conversation of Laura’s existing body of work, adapted to site and size. ‘Range of Light’ is approximately 100’ long by 20’ tall, wrapping around the North side of the Session Building in three dimensions. The piece begins close to human scale, overhead on the ceiling of the building entrance at lower left of the North wall. It emerges from the walkway and lifts up and to the right across the face of the building; becoming increasingly chaotic and mountain like as it rises towards the West corner. It wraps the building, tapering off to the West on the Highway 101 side.
The piece is intended to act as a local landmark, providing a visual and emotional connection to the spirit of panoramic outdoor landscapes. Hopefully, it can serve as a kind of ‘advertisement’ for wild nature; occupying people’s attention on behalf of the environment and preservation, rather than consumerism. The zig zag path of each individual neon line is meant to reflect the internal journey of an individual working towards a challenging goal. Each line individually follows a course of peaks, bends and valleys representing accomplishment and setback along a winding journey. These individual threads weave together to form the overall geologic face of the piece. This is meant as a reflection that positive individual actions become powerful- and contagious- when viewed through the lens of community. A group of individuals, each pulling in their own way towards a shared goal, is as capable of overcoming an impenetrable seeming obstacle as they are of creating it.