Artist Leo Villareal returns to Brown to reflect on his immersive campus light installation

Villareal said that some aspects of his creative process require precise planning and thought, while others emerge from moment to moment, as was the case with "Infinite Composition."

"When [I was] making this work, it [was] very improvisational," Villareal said. "I'm trying things out, and I'm interested in concepts of emergent behavior and artificial life, meaning that you don't necessarily know what the result is going to be - you try something and wait for those moments of surprise to occur."

He recalled that he sat in the lobby of The Lindemann for many sessions - "long into the night and the day" - looking at the artwork from different perspectives. He tuned and adjusted it using a custom-designed software that powers the artwork behind the scenes.

"We worked long and hard to find the exact cocktail of LED, color, temperature, glass and a way to cover the columns in such a way that helps to kind of almost make them disappear, which I was quite excited about," he said.

Villareal said he wanted to ensure that the piece, which is visible from the outside as well as inside of The Lindemann, blends well into the surrounding streetscape and natural environment. For example, the light "softens" at night, as to not overwhelm passersby. After dark, when viewed from the outside, shadows from nearby trees appear to become part of the installation.

When Goldberger asked him to describe his medium, Villareal said he views himself as a light sculptor.

"We're all naturally attracted to light, so it is a very seductive material," Villareal said.

Villareal, who grew up in New Mexico and lives in New York, shared how attending boarding school at Rhode Island's Portsmouth Abbey School was influential to his development as an artist and led him to study set design and sculpture at Yale University.

He took classes in painting and drawing for the first time at Portsmouth Abbey and started traveling to Providence, Boston and New York to visit art museums, where he started seeing "a whole new level of art."

During the talk, Villareal praised The Lindemann's architect, Joshua Ramus of the New York firm REX, who was in attendance, and described the building as sublime.

"The way the lobby just floats in this cantilever - it's like a magic trick," Villareal said.

The planning process for The Lindemann's site-specific installation spanned about nine years. "There was a tremendous amount that went into this behind the scenes, and all that thoughtfulness results in what you see," Villareal said.

Villareal said he was thrilled to return to Brown to visit his installation.

"It's a very neat, very special piece, and it's special to have it in a place like Brown, in an academic environment where you have students studying arts, architecture, engineering, programming - and in a way, the work embodies this blend of those things," Villareal said. "I think more and more, that's what schools are trying to do, mix disciplines up and try hybrid forms. The [Lindemann] Performing Arts Center is exactly that. It's a machine for the future."

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