2013 International Neon Workshops

2013 International Neon Workshops | Art & Education
Taschen Neon No.1, 2009. Borosilicate glass, argon gas, enamel, 200 mm x 650 mm x 200 mm.
Photo by The Crafts Council.

eep Neon and Carry On / 25–28 July / 650 GBP

2013 has only just got started, yet Neon Workshops have been busy
and can proudly confirm not one but two extraordinary four-day neon
courses now organised. The first: Keep Neon and Carry On, to be held at
the end of July, sees special guest artist Angus Powers (USA)
pushing experimentation in furnace glass and neon to the limits. The
four-day workshop, with support from Wheater & Bickerstaff, will be
all about experimenting and expanding perceptions of of what can be done with this media.
Evening events and presentations from tutors will argue why we should
hold onto neon and bring it into the 21st Century. The course will
include neon making and glass blowing. Experience is preferable but
not necessary.

Angus MacDiarmid Powers is the assistant professor of Glass
in the department of Sculpture at Alfred University, New York. As a
celebrated artist, he has exhibited and taught throughout the USA,
Europe and Scandinavia.

Moving Neon / 12–15 September / 565 GBP

Our second major neon workshop, Moving Neon, will be held
in September, focusing on animation of and kinetic movement with neon
light. To accompany his UK exhibition here this year, Los Angeles-based
neon artist Michael Flechtner
will be flying over to share the rare and often forgotten skills of
making neon move. Through an intense schedule of demonstrations,
hands-on practical exercises, discussions and presentations,
participants will be guided and inspired into making their own
sequencing neon art. Experience in working with neon and electronics is
not essential.

Michael Flechtner is a widely published and exhibited artist,
and has won numerous awards, including the J.Paul Getty Trust Fund
Fellowship in 1999. He is a board member for The Museum of Neon Art and
will be showing his first UK solo exhibition here at Neon Workshops 25
September–25 November 2013.

A schedule will be forwarded to participants ahead of the
workshops. Class will start at 10am and finish at 5pm, with a one-hour
break for lunch. On the glass blowing day (Friday) during the workshop
Keep Neon and Carry On, we will depart Neon Workshops at 7:30am in order
to be ready to start at 10am. For each workshop there will be three
evenings of presentations/events relating to the theme.

There are only eight places available on each of the two above
mentioned workshops, and we are accepting participants as of now on a
first-come, first-served basis. You can buy your workshop online with
Paypal or contact Neon Workshops for further info. Our online shop is fully up and running, where you can find workshop gift vouchers, limited edition prints, books and more.

The Workshops fee includes materials but not a neon power
supply/transformer. High-frequency neon transformers are available from
Neon Workshops at 65 GBP each. Food is not included in the workshop
fees. Neon Workshops is located in Wakefield city centre, where there
are a wide choice of food outlets. We can forward a recommended
accommodation list on request.

Beyond 2013…

Northern Lights

A landmark mobile neon workshop: Reykjavik, Iceland / February 2014 / 980 GBP

A four-day Mobile Neon Workshop taught by several artists working in neon and light of
international repute, plus evening events that will take place in
Reykjavik, including an excursion to seek out the Northern Lights during
February next near. Please get in touch if you are interested in being
part of this ultimate hands-on neon light experience.

Neon Workshops was set up in 2008 with an aim to expose, explore
and teach neon as a method of expression and cultural production, as
well as hoping to challenge common expectations of the material. Ideally
located between Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Henry Moore Institute and the newly opened Hepworth Wakefield,
Neon Workshops is the only arts organisation in Europe and Scandinavia
to offer the general public a neon education, and exhibition programme
as well as facility hire.

Offering access to a high-spec neon facility, award-winning
neon makers and artists from all over the world are regularly invited to
teach and exhibit their work. Neon Workshops continues to help revive
neon both inside and outside of the gallery environment.

ncandescent: artist Philip Vaughan’s fury after Hayward Gallery switches off his Neon Tower light sculpture

Gallery criticised over decision not to restore Neon Tower to London skyline

The artist behind one of London’s landmark sculptures has launched a
blistering attack on the

director of the Hayward Gallery – accusing him
of allowing the work to be destroyed.

Philip Vaughan’s Neon Tower, a 45ft (14m) light sculpture that
changes colour according to the

strength and direction of the wind, was a
prominent fixture on the capital’s skyline from 1972

until 2008, when
it was taken down from the roof of the South Bank gallery for
renovation.

But now Vaughan has accused the gallery’s executives
of going back on plans to restore and

return the work to its previous
perch – and singled out the American director Ralph Rugoff for
particular criticism.

Philip Vaughan has accused the Hayward gallery’s executives of going back on plans to restore his Neon Tower work, right

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Neon workshop divulges the tricks of the trade

The twists and turns of neon art - Queens Chronicle: Qboro: Arts, Culture & Living





The Krypton Neon team has worked with and continues to add their
one-of-a-kind
 touch to the sets of productions and projects such as “Men
in Black,” “Mama Mia,”
“Young Frankenstein,” the Victoria Secret
fashion show and restoration and conservation
projects at galleries such
as the Gagosian, in Manhattan.
Read more

Representative overview of Dan Flavin's light works on view for the first time in Switzerland

The Dan Flavin – Lights exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
museum of art provides a representative overview of Flavin's light
works for the first time in Switzerland. Containing around thirty works,
the exhibition explains the artist's development from painting to
creating light works based on selected situations (1961–1964). It spans
the range from his key individual works created with fluorescent tubes
up to the more recent large-scale works.

read more

The Dan Flavin – Lights
exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen museum of art provides a
representative overview of Flavin's light works for the first time in
Switzerland. Containing around thirty works, the exhibition explains the
artist's development from painting to creating light works based on
selected situations (1961–1964). It spans the range from his key
individual works created with fluorescent tubes up to the more recent
large-scale works.

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=61364#.UUthXjdrSkM[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

The Dan Flavin – Lights
exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen museum of art provides a
representative overview of Flavin's light works for the first time in
Switzerland. Containing around thirty works, the exhibition explains the
artist's development from painting to creating light works based on
selected situations (1961–1964). It spans the range from his key
individual works created with fluorescent tubes up to the more recent
large-scale works.

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=61364#.UUthXjdrSkM[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Bright Light, Big Money

Who Collects Major Light Art Works By the Likes of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson? - Penta - Barrons.com

There are some kinds of art that only museums or the very rich can
collect. Among these are major pieces of “light art,” usually made by
sculpting light in very large natural or industrial spaces.
Switzerland’s Hess Family Estates makes wine on four continents, and its
77 year-old chairman, Donald Hess, is a long-time collector of Francis
Bacon, Anselm Kiefer and other important artists. But his newest gallery
on the world’s highest vineyard, at Colomé in Argentina, is dedicated
to only one light artist: James Turrell.

Light art has been around for just short of a century. The first piece, called Light-Space Modulator,
was made in 1922 by László Moholy-Nagy. Not everyone got the
industrial-looking contraption made of shadow-casting wires, glass, and
perforated metal. When the Hungarian took Light-Space Modulator
through U.S. customs in 1937, officers refused to class it as art.
Nonetheless, some big names, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns, have worked with light since, making it arguably the true medium
of the 20th century. For purist collectors like Hess, however, real
light artists work with nothing else, and of these, James Turrell, an
American Quaker who turns 70 this year, is the acknowledged grand
master.

Turrell’s Sistine Chapel is in Arizona’s Painted Desert. In 1977, the
artist bought an extinct volcano, called Roden Crater, outside
Flagstaff. He has spent the last 35 years, and an estimated $45 million
of institutional and private contributions, working on his masterpiece.
Of the twenty works Roden Crater will eventually contain, around a
third are finished, including the Alpha Tunnel, an 845 foot borehole
designed to focus a perfect disc of light on a slab of white stone. Like
all of Turrell’s work, this so-called Skyspace relies on two things:
natural light and the human eye. Look at the disc and it slowly changes
shape and color, our vision constantly shifting to accommodate Turrell’s
astonishing creation.

When Roden Crater is finished – and no-one knows when that will be —
it will be the world’s biggest artwork, a combination of sculpture,
solar observatory and Egyptian pyramid. Until then, access is limited
to the wealthy patrons, like Hess, who have between them contributed
tens of millions of dollars to Turrell’s project. “I have been to Roden
several times,” Hess says. “It is a fantastic, crazy work.”

Buying Bacons is one thing: you can hang them, move them around and,
if necessary, sell them again. Buying Turrells is quite another. Light
artworks tend to be site-specific, and on an epic scale – so much so
that they usually spend years as blueprints before their owners can have
them built.

“I bought the first of my [nine] Turrells, Stufe White (1967),
in the early ‘Seventies,” says Hess, from his home in Bern,
Switzerland. “For years, I had these big, grey books in my library here –
contracts from James, with minute instructions on how each work was
going to be made. One day, I thought: ‘I’ll be damned if I die without
seeing them.’ So I went around museums, offering to lend my Turrells if
they would build them. And they all said, ‘You must be crazy.’”

So in 2009 Hess built his own, 18,000 square foot James Turrell Museum in
Argentina. “I rang James to tell him what I was planning and he said,
‘Great! I love Buenos Aires!’” Hess recalls. “I had to break it to him
that it was not quite BA, that it was a two hour flight and five hour drive away.”

Undeterred, Turrell came to Colomé and designed his own gallery. Last
year, the museum attracted 3,500 visitors; that’s hardly the 85,000 who
went around the Hess Family Collection of wines in Napa, California,
but not bad considering where it is. As to the near-impossibility of
selling his Turrell works, Donald Hess is sanguine. “Wine is my
business. If you want to drink it, you have to pay,” he says. “Art is my
hobby, and you can enjoy it for free. I don’t do it for the money.”

Meanwhile, eight thousand miles away, in southeast Ukraine, light art
also serves a practical purpose in the grim industrial town of
Dnepropetrovsk. Dnepropetrovsk was a manufacturing base for ballistic
missiles, and, until 1991, closed to foreigners. Last October, however,
the Ukrainian steel magnate and major art collector, Victor Pinchuk,
opened the Interpipe metal works on the Dnieper River, the first
large-scale steel mill to be built in Ukraine for 40 years.

Dnepropetrovsk
Sunrise by Olafur Eliasson, hovering over a Ukrainian steel mill town.
Courtesy of:  Sergii Illin/The Victor Pinchuk Foundation

Pinchuk’s electric smelters claim to be among the world’s most
environmentally advanced ­– not the smoke-belching Soviet-era plants of
the past – and Pinchuk wanted to signal this fact. So he commissioned
the Danish light artist, Olafur Eliasson, to create Dnepropetrovsk Sunrise, the 200-foot-tall sun, light-emitting and made from steel, which now shines from the Interpipe compound. By night, the work doubles as a moon.

“In post-Soviet Eastern Europe, it’s important to send a message about innovation and modernization,” Pinchuk says.  “Olafur’s Sunrise
symbolizes a new start, a new light. It combines two artworks – the sun
and the mill which I, as an engineer, also see as art.” Four more of
Eliasson’s monumental light pieces are built into the factory’s
structure.

“He loved the craziness of creating a new astronomy for
Dnepropetrovsk,” says Pinchuk. What did this craziness cost? The
Ukrainian industrialist merely notes that the entire Interpipe project
came in at $700 million, of which Eliasson’s fee was a part. “That is
certainly the highest price I have ever paid for an artwork,” he says.

While that’s no doubt so, smart collectors like Hess and Pinchuk also
use the visibility of light art to attract visitors to their
businesses, subtly changing the economics of their unusual collections.

11 Pieces Of Light Art That Boggle Your Senses

8 | 11 Pieces Of Light Art That Boggle Your Senses | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Any art exhibit that begins with a warning sign ("some installations
contain artificial mist, flashing, or strobe lighting") is destined for
success.