When I first saw Wilfred’s Lumia, the moving light performance made me think of aurora. Different than what we have watched in last week’s class where the geometric shapes dance towards the music, Wilfred’s translucent lights set against the black background doesn’t have a fixed shape. “imitating light effects on canvas or in marble could never replicate the innate character of luminosity.” (Orgeman 21). Wilfred’s images have more fluidity that can not easily captured in the canvas. I think to be the first to make light as a form of art work and influence many artists around that time and afterwards is the significance of his work.
I’m pretty interested in the color usage of Wilfred performance and wondered why he never changed his background color for each piece? And I found out the answer in Orgeman’s text: “for Wilfred, darkness was to lumia as silence was to music,”the point of departure, support, and return” for all compositions. “Darkness must be established” (Orgeman 32). And I then feel that this statement works for me as well. In my imagination, black is the color that can absorb and mute all the sounds but white can’t.
In his techniques, I see him played a lot around the mirror reflection and the different positions of lamps and different angles of filaments.