When Light Becomes Art...

With the end of the holiday season, America’s odd obsession with colored lights largely disappears. They seem to be there when we need them, arriving in time for the shortest days of the year to make our nights just a bit brighter. Then they disappear as quickly as they arrived leaving the nights as long and dark as before. We Portlanders  must miss them, or perhaps those nights just become too dark or too long for us to bear. Whatever the reason, a month after the holidays have died down, Portlanders bring light  back to center stage, but in a different way, and with a drastically different feel: steel sculptures filled with crackling wood fires, interactive art installations and odd glowing alien shapes. This is Portland’s Winter Lights Festival.

Tillikum Crossing. Note the green glow on the bridge towers. the city lights, as well as the searchlight and navigation lights add to the festivities, whether intentional or not.

Whether intentional or not, the primary venue for the festival is chosen incredibly well. The stretch of waterfront in which the festival occurs is adjacent to Tri-Met’s Orange Line MAX project, near where the train crosses the Willamette River. The Tilikum Crossing, which carries the MAX, has an array of spotlights that cast colors on the concrete towers based on river conditions, and the MAX station at the end of the bridge is covered by well-lit orange steel cylinders: in a way the area is a light festival year round. In light of the event at hand (no pun intended), even simple things such as flashlights and traffic lights seem to fit in.

The highlight of the festival for me was this fire-breathing dragon. The beast itself was made of polished steel, with a propane gun used to produce it's breath.

The event each February covers several city blocks ranging from OMSI by the water, inland toward the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, and nearly half a mile north along the river. Unfortunately, the event lasts only three nights, and is well-known among enough Portlanders to make navigating the waterfront difficult at best. There is usually just enough room, to stare at a hypnotic backlit-steel wheel, or a set of mushroom-like objects that play musical notes when touched. In more secluded corners, artists set up steel sculptures with bonfires burning inside and a massive stack of firewood to fuel their creations. In some cases it isn’t clear if the object is a sculpture, a vehicle... or some combination of the two. I passed a peculiar glowing blue cylinder, which I assumed to be a static sculpture. I didn’t reconsider this until I later saw it coming down the path towards me!

I spied this sculpture/vehicle a number of times during our visit. The first time I saw it i assumed it to be a stationary exhibit. I was forced to reconsider when it began to move!

Some, like the mushrooms, are interactive and encourage, or even require participation in order to make sense of them.  That’s the purpose of such festivals I feel, to get people involved. Many sculptures are designed to draw the visitor in and in a way, you become part of the art. Near the rail museum, a series of disks was hung from a steel frame. The blue lights turned yellow and played a note when someone walks beneath them. It’s a prompt: an invitation for each of us there to make something out of it, to define it for ourselves. Children run across the stage, tripping all the light sensors and stirring up the notes like sliding hands over a keyboard. In the opposite corner of the stage, a young couple slow danced beneath the disks, in time with the surprisingly coherent song their dance created. People involve themselves with the artwork in other ways too. They take photos, wear bright colored lights, glowing necklaces, or decorate bicycles.

Even the railroad museum decorated. The ceiling was bathed in red, pink and purple light, and the  PA-1 locomotive was covered in stars and stripes!

Not all exhibits required participation: along the Eastbank Esplanade, a series of cocoon-like glowing objects hang from trees, and LED stripes appear to jump up a steel frame built for them. In some cases, getting a definitive meaning out of the artwork is difficult. A projector was set up to turn a concrete building into an active apartment building, with silhouettes in the windows and a peculiar futuristic backdrop.

Across the street, a steel dragon spit flames with a propane jet, it’s gunfire-like breath followed by squeals of startled children. And lest we forget the Tesla coil demonstrations in the railroad museum. I’m one who likes to find definitive meaning in things, but in sculptures like this, that can’t be done. The meaning, as with the glowing disks , would seem to be what you want it to be. It isn’t formal and self defined like oil paintings, it’s begs to be made sense of, while not rejecting any explanation as invalid. What are the people in the windows doing? It’s unlikely anyone will come up with the same details.

This apartment building with it's futuristic urban skyline was located across Water Avenue from OMSI. Visitors gathered on the curb to watch the people inside the building interact with each other. This intricate mural was entirely light--during the day, this is the wall of a business. 

It wasn’t until I was researching for this article that I discovered that we had only seen a portion of the festival. It was the largest portion, but with this realization, it seems I missed out. The festival lasts three nights for a reason. It’s the sort of activity that requires both nights, a map, and a journey around town, via car, paddle boat, or even on foot to fully experience.

If you attended the event, what are your thoughts?