So, we started with 50 mph wind gusts that canceled our original flight.  But we were up early the next morning for the first flight out.   It made our first day on the ground a shooting day and we had our game faces on.

first flight out after a canceled flight the night before

We made it to Minnesota safe and sound….ready to rock……

cool geometry at the minnesota airport

The nights were exercises in mad entry and tactical assessment. Dark, echoing iron in forgotten industrial interiors with machines the size of an entire floor that were left with the building……machines whose scale are fearful. How were these beasts installed…piece by piece or was a wall left open and was there a crane of mythic proportions grinding metal braided cables and chains over greasy pulleys creaking under the strain of lifting their now abandoned load? Maybe, and probably, some poor people schlepped every piece of each of these machines up the narrow, dangerous stairs. They must have had a system because the stairs will not accommodate 2 people going in different directions especially not laden with metal machine parts.

at night these stairs are scary

Hard concrete, metal doors, broken windows and vast spaces reverberating with emptiness. Osha certainly had no say in the construction of these places. And now, in repose, the open elevator shafts and uncovered floor shafts lie in wait like deep-water, bottom dwelling, predators…..quiet, sinister, deadly and waiting.

Climbing old, iron mill stairs, narrow for one person passage, creates a noise from vibrating the stairs on the way up and down that resonates throughout the rusted iron of 7 stories. It turns into a deep hum when 6 people tromp down the stairs in boots. The braided metal cables clang on the 4th floor from the movement and startled pigeons dart off with the first bang of loose, swinging, metal cargo doors left to rage nightly in the swirling Minnesota wind.

This is concealed lights held low, cupped near windows and cascading ominously down through the grating of iron stairs creating crazy motion down the shaft of a stairwell designed to create a fear of death and cast out the weak of heart and mind. The strong persevere up, down, up….the flashlight swishing is a welcome distraction from ghosts mildly stationed in shadows content to watch your passage, but secretly shifting and shuffling to distract, to cause a misstep…..to have you join them in their eternity.

3 days….cold wind, snow drifts, swollen Mississippi river reflections from spun fireballs under a bridge with pleasure boats drifting, over-lit and gaudy, by our time capturing moments unaware of our magic lurking just out of site in the night with mystical lights shielded from their view by monster modern concrete columns. They are just far away enough to not smell the acrid smoke, to see unidentified spinning lights shooting their way across our retinas and into the time machine that is our camera. Their lives do not contain fireballs skimming horizontally across the Mississippi river before being extinguished by water struggling to stay above freezing.

mississippi river boat in Minnesota

Where are the lines and why are they drawn? Which occasions were they designed for? Lines of entry, lines of delineation and circumvention….lines of light that mark our passage, all lines lead to and stem from an interior space. Our progress is across thresholds lonely in their memories of busy passage, of life, of humanity that conceptualized these spaces then moved on. Our motion is internal and towards an internal place. A place we feel exists, that draws us, that motivates us to get up, get out and quest for something. What is the quest for? What is the end game for this?

Well, the destination is not really a physical one and the journey is only representational in it’s physicality. The image at the end of this process is tangible and physical, but the end game is the experience for the viewer; the mental space they are (hopefully) jolted into upon seeing the image. The image experience is the destination and the journey for the viewer. The journey and story of the image is consolidated into a single picture that implies enough, and is compelling enough creatively, to instantly make the mind of the viewer work feverishly analyzing the image, enjoying the challenge, feeling wonder, smiling at the feeling and imagining the actions it must have taken the artist to not only make the image but arrive at the location…..the journey, they end up taking it with you in their own way, left to fill in the story with realities the artist helps construct with the creative execution and intangible imbuing of the image. The emotions and sensibilities of the image provide the pallets for the imaginations of the viewers as they follow you in their mental journey.

gotta get there to get it

When I look at a light painting picture in a location that is in some way “extreme” or outside of my everyday reality I feel the power of that place in the image….If I make a light orb, for example, in my kitchen and then make another orb in the French Alps at the snow line, I bet the Alps orb will be more impactful. Certainly, the details can be argued, maybe I set-dress the kitchen creatively and make a wicked image…..but the point would remain…it’s the background, the environment, that the orbs/light sculptures/artists interact with and place the light objects into that is the main signifier.

The journey is towards an experience that is in itself intangible, but more powerful than any of the concrete walls, massive metal doors swinging violently shut with spasmic irregularity, or loose shaft grates that would welcome a new passenger down their lethal slide. The journey is through these gauntlets physically, but into the mind/emotions/psyche…..the journey evokes and elicits sensations unique to the nature of each location. The procession imbues each traveler with it’s essence and we integrate, re-assimilate, re-contextualize, re-invent these sensations through the artists’ alchemical internal swirl into expressions of our psychic imprint from the environment. The light images come from outside ourselves and inside ourselves in equal measure. We are vessels and masters simultaneously.

The artist acts in the space of time travel and assimilates the lifetime’s and life of the people that have passed before. The psychic traces and psychological reactions to the stark evidence of previous lives puts the artist into a place that is impossible to fully imagine before the moment comes. It’s a progression to an internal place whose time and space are infinitely variable and impossible to predict, but once there the artist knows it instinctively. The spirit descends and the calm, quiet, exhilaration moment arrives when you know for certain, without reason, that you are meant to create right then, in these moments, in the captured series of time and motion that is the light painters’ aboriginal hand print on the face of the invisible, quantum mechanical surface of our new world order rock walls.

It is a new technology extension of our human need to leave an indelible mark on the palaces of our ancestors.

The production journey of Luminary has begun. We are after a series of images and experiences. We are after interactive encounters that exists because of a shared creative vision. We are seeking the nature of creative moments.  We can’t predict the specifics and we can’t govern all the details, but be sure, when the time comes we’ll be rolling…..in surround sound.