Petra Bachmaier & Sean Gallero (Luftwerk)
COLORSCAPES 2022

COLORSCAPES was a multipart, multisensory, multisite project created for Cheekwood Estate & Gardens. The exhibition uses color to explore the perception of the physical world and consists of a series of outdoor and indoor works set along a prescribed path that unfold 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.

Luftwerk drew on the specifics of Cheekwood’s 55-acre campus as well as the complex, rich history of color and color theory—from the histories of plant-based pigments like indigo to the developments of color theory during a golden age of scientific discovery in the late nineteenth century.

Sky Blue, 2022
In 1789, the Swiss scientist and mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) invented a device called a cyanometer (or cyanomètre). A simple tool made to measure the blueness of the sky, it is essentially a circle of paper with gradients of Prussian blue that move from white to black in fifty-two distinct degrees of color. Saussure, along with subsequent scientifically minded explorers like Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), used the device to demonstrate that the color of the sky grows darker with increases in elevation. Sky Blue transforms the existing architecture of the portico of Cheekwood’s Historic Mansion into an inhabitable cyanometer. In this environmental installation the ever-present if often unnoticed connection between sky, place, nature, color, and individual are acutely perceptible and felt.

Exact Dutch Yellow, 2022
A play on words and the act of naming, 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 (1809-1882), for example, 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 “Chestnut brown.” Darwin, however, occasionally ad-libbed, altering “Dutch Orange” to “Exact Dutch Yellow” when he published his Beagle Zoology Notes. Realized here in two shades of neon, Darwin’s turn of phrase mixes colors and creates an orange glow.

Light Dips into Dark Falls into Light, 2022
Based on the principles of a Venn Diagram, which uses overlapping circles to illustrate the relationships among or between distinct sets of things, Light Dips into Dark Falls into Light explores how colors incline towards one another, and combine to become secondary colors. Comprised of three groups of pure yellow ochre, oxide green, and ultramarine pigments, this sculptural work is activated by special LED lighting, which creates a cyclical visual flow between light and darks, which dramatically alters and confuses the optical and spatial understanding of the work’s form.

Meadow, 2022
Patrick Syme was the most renowned Scottish flower painter of his time. Taking inspiration from his combined exploration of the botanical and the aesthetic, Meadow is made from paint derived from hues of botanicals like marigold and indigo collected from the Color Garden plantings at Cheekwood as well as from Humboldt Park in Chicago. As this painted meadow is illuminated, its various diffused colors come to life, allowing the work—and the viewer(s) who experience it—to explore the interplay on tones, especially those that live between the light and the dark. The subtle ombre gradation of Meadow evokes the experience of a landscape at dusk.