Artists Light up Downtown Portland with Captivating Art

Living in Oregon, many of us know the winter months can be tough to get through. With the lack of sunshine and ever-pouring rain, many find themselves longing for warmer months. To help combat the cold and dark, the Willamette Light Brigade, a nonprofit arts organization, now puts on the Portland Winter Light Festival. The popular annual event brings the community together to view and enjoy the many talented artists we have in the Portland area.

This year’s festival took place over two weekends, Feb. 2-10, with 170 free light-based art installations that brightened the night.

According to a Light Festival press release, “This year’s theme, ‘What Glows Under Pressure,’ explores resilience and creativity through a diverse range of experiences.” This theme could be seen throughout the festival sites, with many artists expressing their true emotions and experiences through their art.

One of my favorite examples of this was from a coral reef art piece called “Dimensional Dreams XXL Coral Reef” by the artist Becca Priddy. Priddy wrote in her artist’s statement, “Coral Reef was inspired by traveling to tropical locations. When snorkeling in these warm waters, stress seems to melt away as I watch the schools of fish swim through coral reefs…” This piece really showcases the artist’s experience of coral reefs and how beautiful and majestic their ecosystem can be.

Another more abstract or puzzling art piece was created by Nicky Alice with her Tesseract display. A Tesseract is a large optical illusion in the shape of a cube, created with precise placement of mirrors and LEDs to create a multi-dimensional effect.

Alice wrote, “My idea is to have viewers immerse themselves deeply in the appreciation of the unknown fourth dimension.” This complex art instillation really immerses the viewer into looking at the cube from every different direction, focusing on the many different aspects of the multi-dimension effect.

Arguably, the most interactive art display of the light festival was a snowflake structure that projected a visual art display onto aluminum snowflake cutouts. This display was complex, with many different shapes and sizes of snowflakes, with different patterns and colors projected onto each cutout. This wasn’t just any regular stationary art display: There was an infrared hand-gesture controller that audience members could wave their hand past to make the snowflakes spin and further increase the beauty and complexity of the art display.

The artist, Marcell Marias, explained that his art instillation “KinetiColor” “…started out as a static, module snowflake sculpture to pay homage to wintertime and to challenge myself in video-mapping a complex shape – the beautiful snowflake.”

Even though this year’s light festival has passed, the Winter Light Festival returns each winter and is free for anyone to come and enjoy the visual artwork and interactive displays. I am sure next year’s version will be just as powerful and interesting.

Images by Andrew Hull