About the Art
Hexagonal Grid consists of a series of panels installed along the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry (CBEC) lobby walls. A clean, symmetrical grid of honeycomb forms in steel serves as the armature for this LED light installation's ever-shifting display of light and color. Hundreds of evenly spaced dots of light illuminate and extinguish in an impossible-to-predict pattern. Close up, one can easily become hypnotized waiting for a single light to flicker on and off, changing color as it does. At a distance, the sequence of lights becomes a wave of perpetual motion, its endlessly shifting patterns evoking both the swift flow of water and the hot ooze of magma.
Hexagonal Grid is utterly open to interpretation. The meaning seems as variable as the colors of light that constantly dance across the metal honeycomb grid. The work reminds us that simple components — atoms, molecules, pixels — make up the complex systems of our lives.
Hexagonal Grid is one of the few examples of time-based media art within Ohio State’s collection. Unlike other genres, such as painting or sculpture, time-based media work unfolds to viewers over minutes, hours, or even days. Its appearance is radically different at night from day. Moreover, the code controlling the lights and colors is randomized, ensuring that they will never appear in the same pattern twice. Like the research conducted in the CBEC, Hexagonal Grid constantly offers new discoveries.
Collection of The Ohio State University. Funded through the Ohio Percent for Art program.
Material
LED Light Installation
Location
Inside the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry Building (CBEC)
About the Artist
Villareal’s education reveals his longtime interest in the intersection of art and technology. He received his BA in Sculpture from Yale in 1990 and pursued graduate study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. According to the artist, his work combines his background in art and programming to “visually manifest code in light.” In Villareal’s light installations, simple elements layered over time create mesmerizing displays reminiscent of both the digital and the natural. Although he works at many scales from small wall-based works to the massive Golden Gate Bridge, some of his most memorable are architecturally scaled. Many of his commissioned works are site-specific and are often responsive to the spaces they inhabit, visually connecting the interior and exterior.
