April 24 to April 27, 2025 at EXPO Chicago X 6018|North

PRAIRIE COLORFIELD captures and reimagines fragments of the landscape we inhabit as a reminder of the loss of native prairie. The color field on the walls, Acres of Blooms, is made from botanical pigments. The abstracted landscape painting references a time when prairies occupied two-thirds of the midwestern landscape, rich in biodiversity, a holistic interconnected ecosystem of healthy soil, abundant flora, and myriads of bees and butterflies.

The interactive work, Extraction, is a mound of sand and botanicals. Visitors are invited to choose from the color spectrum of the botanicals to add botanicals to the mound. The work represents that prairie that has been removed to make way for construction, destruction, and other changes to the land. By visitors adding to Extraction, they acknowledge their daily participation in the changes to the land. As an exchange they are encouraged to plant pollinator seeds.

The first iteration of Acres of Bloom was created as part of Lost & Found, a group exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden (2024). The work came alive as part of an effort to raise awareness of the science involved in prairie preservation. The botanicals used were collected by a group of volunteers at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The new iteration uses the remainder of those materials in combination with Black-eye Susan, handpicked along train tracks during last summer and pine needles sourced from repurposed Christmas trees. This project is unique and an expression of our curiosity of the natural world, its color palette and materiality. Prairie Colorfield is not archival, to live with it is like observing an evolving painterly experience that changes like our landscape in seasons.

Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL, Nov 3rd – Dec 16th, 2023
Achromatic surfaces at first glance subsequently reveal radiant auras of subtly colored light. The concealed verso sides of the pieces employ surfaces painted fluorescent colors to reflect glowing ambient light on the surrounding wall. With these sculptural works, shades reveal gestures that capture a passage of light, simulations of the orange light at dawn or an hour passing in the afternoon. The work is minimal, presenting moments to hold still.

In the tentative
darkness of the
raisins there was
half of the
sun
then the shadow
of the past
From “No Sky” by Etel Adnan, translation from French by Sarah Riggs

SCENOGRAPHY OF SPACE, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, June 2023

An inspiration for this installation SCENOGRAPHY OF SPACE, which brings together visual art & film, was Hans Richter’s film “Rhythmus 21”. Hans Richter was an important 20th century German artist and filmmaker known for his avant-garde works. One of his notable films, “Rhythm 21” from 1921 is considered one of the earliest abstract films ever made and has been called a “key film of modernism.” In this film, Richter explored the representation of abstract forms, movements, and rhythms. The film consists of trick moving geometric shapes and patterns. Black and white squares appear in fades up and down on the screen. They sometimes appear to move from one side of the frame to the other, sometimes from foreground to background.

Rhythm was shot in black and white and lasts about 3 minutes – as does the installation Scenography of Space. “Rhythm” had a profound influence on many subsequent artists and filmmakers and, as stated earlier, also served as inspiration for Luftwerk. Luftwerk’s artistic practice, with its emphasis on light, color, and choreographed projections, is conceptually related to Richter’s exploration of abstract forms and rhythms. Luftwerk’s work extends Richter’s legacy and bridges the gap between film and visual art. By incorporating light projections and techniques (in Luftwerk’s case: motors / fabric panels), they push the boundaries of the medium and develop a unique visual language, expanding the possibilities of film and visual art through their innovative and boundary-breaking approach.

And while we’re on the subject of perception, we’re also in NOW, our theme of the Hamburg Short Film Festival. An expanded concept of media art also includes the use of light and movement as artistic material. As early as the 1950s, artists of the ZERO group such as Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker were concerned with light as a creative medium. Their concern was to trace painting back to its conditions, namely in particular to light as the underlying element. In doing so, however, they left the technique of painting with paint and canvas and created spatial works that cast shadows or evoked reflections and incorporated movement into their concept. The result was works whose impression changes depending on the viewer’s point of view. Heinz Mack does not consider color or other formal components, but their spatial organization and movement as the actual form of artistic work.

Scenography of Space by Luftwerk also works as a space-related artwork with the integration of a variable viewer perspective. As the:visitor:walks through the space, there is no fixed viewer standpoint that dictates an optimal perspective of perception. Movement and orientation in the space is an intentional element of the visitor experience.

— Melike Bilir —

Chicago Cultural Center, Exhibit Hall, October 8, 2022 – January 29, 2023

Exact Dutch Yellow presents abstracted, atmospheric sculptural light installations that refuse to offer a singular prescription for how to view them. To stand in front of, or rather within, these works is to experience the phenomenon of color both optically and physically but with an awareness that whatever you experience will be unique and ineffable. 
A play on words and the act of naming, the exhibition title Exact Dutch Yellow references how subjective both the impression and classification of color was and remains. In Patrick Syme’s book, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, “Dutch Orange” is described by the crest of a gold-crest wren, the common marigold, and a streak of red orpiment, an arsenic sulfide mineral. When the noted English biologist Charles Darwin embarked on his now famous journey aboard the HMS Beagle between 1831-1826, he brought along Syme’s book and used it extensively. Darwin often used the exact phrasing to describe the creatures he encountered, for example a “French grey” octopus that changed shades from a “Hyacinth red” to a “Chesnut brown.” Darwin, however, occasionally ad-libbed, altering “Dutch Orange” to “Exact Dutch Yellow” when he published his Beagle Zoology Notes.
At the heart of the exhibition, underscored by its title, is the tacit acknowledgment that for all of its visibility, for all its presence, color—or at least how we name, classify, and experience it—remains subjective if not outright illusive.

Frequency Chronology, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University, September 9 – October 9, 2022

The cycle between light and dark, day and night, reveals a daily spectacle of color which has long-inspired scientists and artists, bringing forth a canon of theories about color and perception. Frequency/Chronology is a series of mixed media installations that explore those theories to create an immersive dialogue on color.

Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, Nashville, TN, May 7-September 4, 2022

The contemporary understanding of color has a rich and complex history, whether through the histories of plant-based pigments like indigo, or the development of color theory through the discourses of Enlightenment-era writers, scientists, and naturalists. One of the most significant examples of the latter is the Scottish artist Patrick Syme’s Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. First published in 1814 and based on the groundbreaking work of German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, the book presented a taxonomic guide to the colors of the natural world and was a precursor to the modern Pantone system. Color—and more specifically the color classified in Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours—served as the conceptual springboard for a vibrant site-specific takeover at the Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville, TN. In this unique context, COLORSCAPES explores how the historic, yet fundamental scientific knowledge of color, perception, and nature can inform and connect us to the natural world today.
COLORSCAPES consisted of a series of dynamic outdoor installations and gallery interventions. Set along a prescribed path, the exhibition unfolds across Cheekwood’s Bradford Robertson Color Garden, Arboretum Lawn, and Bracken Foundation Children’s Garden before moving up to the portico of the Historic Mansion & Museum and into its more intimately scaled galleries. Inside, Luftwerk created a series of immersive color and light installations using botanical colors in combination with color changing light conditions that transform into abstracted, atmospheric experiences. Whether using natural pigments, exploring the phenomenon of light and color in the sky, or building on the histories explored in the gardens, the works installed in the galleries are informed by a holistic perception of the natural world and an interconnected ecology. “Unity through variety” is the mantra of this site-specific exhibition, which will offer a multi-layered journey that responds to and connects with the different gardens, architecture, and collections of Cheekwood.

Centered around the shape of a square, two interconnected square spaces, painted in contrasting color patterns and illuminated with color changing light, shift the viewer’s spatial recognition, giving the illusion of revealing and dissolving spaces. This work explores the universal, simple form of the square as a pure expression of a spatial idea, complete in itself, and also as a shape that can be turned into triangles or rectangles – as the building block for its layout.

Museum für Gestaltung Zürich: Total Space, October 23, 2020 – June 20, 2021
Secrist | Beach, Salon Invitational, Sept 22, 2024 – Jan 4, 2025

Drawing inspiration from the theories of the Italian Renaissance painter and polymath Leon Battista Alberti Luftwerk applies Alberti’s observations on color and perspective to create an ever-changing, immersive space. Two pigments used in painting that bear the geographical names Naples yellow and Prussian blue were applied to the high walls of the space in precise geometric patterns. And then the room was flooded with light. With these three components alone, Luftwerk creates a vibrant spatial landscape. Light, color, and form fuse to form a whole that, once illuminated, can be contracted or expanded, going through continuous transformations. Combining the two colors with light generates a harmonious and almost meditative effect that alternately defines or blurs our perception of space.