A Luminous LED Light Installation Will Soon Carpet Madison Square Park in NYC

A look at the future Whiteout installation in Madison Square Park. Image ©Erwin Redl, Proposal for Whiteout, 2017. Steel and animated white LEDs, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist.

A luminous carpet of LED lights is coming to Madison Square Park’s central Oval Lawn, the Madison Square Park Conservancy has announced. From November 16, 2017 through April 15, 2018, the park will host the exhibition Whiteout by artist Erwin Redl. The Austrian artist’s public art project will be made up of hundreds of white spheres containing LED lights suspended from steel poles and cabling, which will allow the lights to move with the wind in the dark months of autumn and winter.

Image ©Erwin Redl

Image ©Erwin Redl

“I am intrigued by the Park’s option of a large-scale installation that blurs the border between the virtual and the real,” said Redl of the exhibition. “The physicality of the swaying orbs in conjunction with the abstract animations of their embedded white lights allows the public to explore a new, hybrid reality in this urban setting.”

Image ©Erwin Redl

Image ©Erwin Redl

Redl is best known for his light projects on building exteriors, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. With Whiteout and his previous works, Redl is fascinated with the “tiny sequencing of lights,” something that Keats Myer, Executive Director of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, believes “will be a beauteous interpretation of the Oval Lawn during the shortest days of the calendar year.”

Whiteout will be the 35th outdoor exhibition for Madison Square Park, which welcomes more than 60,000 visitors daily.

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