“Working with light is so primal. […] We have, as humans, this very deep response to it. So I’m interested in the hypnotic qualities of when you’re staring into a campfire – tapping into that I think is very powerful and something you can’t decode either.” —Leo Villareal
Although typically – and most famously – expressed through light sculptures as varied as their locations (the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the ceiling of a subway station), the heart of Leo Villareal’s artistic practice is in stripping down and examining basic systems and human’s responses to them. Opening today at the Armory Show will be the largest digital media artwork ever presented at the fair, Villareal’s Star Ceiling (2019), a 75-foot long installation in the walkway between Piers 90 and 92, presented in partnership with Pace Gallery.
On the occasion of the installation of his 2016 work Light Matrix (MIT), in the lobby of the Morris and Sophie Chang Building on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Villareal spoke with the MIT List Visual Arts Center about his work, and about the installation at MIT.