Tag: art

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Seconds to Last

A photo of Cynthia Minet discussing her sculpture "Seconds to Last" to a group of gallery visitors
A photo of the rhino sculpture fully lit from within.
A photo of the rhino sculpture lit from within half way through the lighting sequence.
A photo of the rhino sculpture with its internal lights off.

In a departure from previous materials, Cynthia Minet used discarded tents to create this life size representation of the nearly extinct Northern White Rhinoceros. In this installation, Seconds to Last, Cynthia wanted to use light to convey the disappearance of these huge beasts.

Due to the volume of the sculpture and in an attempt to avoid hot spots I used LIFX smart bulbs, 7 of them whose colors reference the seven energy chakras, to provide the internal lighting. To program the sequence of the bulbs fading off I installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and set this up like a typical smart home automation. This allowed us to easily program a time of day sequence and let it run during gallery hours but turn off for the night.

A photo of the clay model for the rhino in the foreground and the finished piece in the background
The clay model that Cynthia made with the finished sculpture in the background

Visit Cynthia’s Seconds to Last page for a full description of the work.

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Jacked: Panthera Atrox

Another collaboration with Cynthia Minet. Jacked: Panthera Atrox is the latest of her incredible animal creations built from reclaimed plastic and this time animated with a similar mechanism to a pump jack used to push oil out of the ground. The lioness’ head tilts up and down with the rhythmic movement of the pump arm.

A photo of a sculpture made of reclaimed plastics and LED lights. It's a representation of an extinct lion, Panthera Atrox. The photo shows it on display in the window of the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles.
Panthera Atrox on display at the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles

I worked with Cynthia to install the LED lighting throughout the sculpture and programmed the colors using an Arduino and the FastLED library. This allowed us to tune each individual LED to the color based on the light’s location within the sculpture.

Jacked was on exhibit at the Craft Contemporary and stood in the window opposite the La Brea tar pits.

3D printed skulls lit from below with projected, animated text beside them

In addition to the Panthera Atrox Cynthia had printed three skulls of animals that have been lost to extinction. We installed mini projectors above the skulls and I animated the text displayed by each skull to slowly disintegrate in After Effects. The text is from Charles Harper Webb’s poem, “The Animals are Leaving”.

For more information on the installation visit Cynthia’s Jacked: Panthera Atrox page.