To brighten your day...

Some thoughts on the sun, the summer, and how to light a show without burning things down.

Image Description: A landscape view of a desert plateau, framed by two edges of green shrub. The sky is also green, full of smoke from the nearby Black Fire in the Gila National Forest, burning since May 13. The sun is a yellow orb, its glow radiating warmly through the peevish sky.

This week it will be in the 100+ degrees, every day. I water my roses and lavender, and within seconds the water is slurped up by the dry ground. Just under the surface, the dirt remains dry and sandy. We haven’t had rain that I can remember since around October. I’ve started slathering a thick eczema cream over my whole body, just so my skin doesn’t look like the cracked earth around my house: I leave grease stains wherever I go. We are parched and making do in an inhospitable landscape.

With just over 14 hours of sunshine today, I am thinking not only about the heat, but also about the light, in its dramatic abundance. As I write this, the sun is directly overhead and everything is bathed in this startlingly bright white light. The sky is a light blue, and everything around me is cast in strong relief, with almost no shadow. I have to squint to see anything clearly, and I wear dark glasses anytime I am outside. By the time I return home tonight, close to 8 pm, the light will be glowy and warm. If the smoke from the Black Forest fire in the nearby Gila National Forest is hovering over my town as it has been for several weeks, the light will shift to orange and browns, that eerie heated color that feels like the edge of a storm. The sun will be hot pink or glowy neon orange, the debris in the air making it beautiful and terrifying.

The light here is unforgiving and blunt. Nothing about it suggests softness. But as evening sets, its effects on the mountains surrounding the valley where I live can be magical: their silhouettes move through gradations of different hues, from orange and red to softening purple and blue to almost-black. That is to say: the light emphatically changes what and how I see.

Lighting an exhibition is among my favorite moments of making a show. Not the scurrying up and down the ladder and fighting with old tracks part, but the part where you see how the lighting holds everything together. That part, to me, remains magical. Light can change everything. From the tint of the bulbs you use—warm, cool, daylight, neon—to their placement and how you might supplement them, lighting can deeply affect a viewer’s experience of your work. And it always informs the mood of a space, the ways the space feels expansive or intimate, airy or dense. The subtleties of a well-designed lighting plan for an exhibition are what can make a show really sing (or threaten or prove its point or embrace or invite tenderness).

Some of my readers will be able to work with a curator or preparator who loves lighting at some point and can offer thoughtful solutions to the lighting design of a particular project. I hope you ask them a million questions and learn everything they can offer you about that aspect of show-making. But in the meantime, as you’re thinking about an exhibition install, here are a few ways you might approach light, making decisions about its tone, brightness, placement, and effects. Even in the most under-resourced spaces, I encourage you to think creatively about how you will light something: as an artist, you have the wild permission to do anything (as long as you don’t burn the building down….. Although if you do—to suggest a silver lining—it may also create some remarkable lighting effects).

Facetious and wildly inappropriate 2022 burn-it-all-down energy aside, here are some ways you might think about lighting as you develop your exhibitions:

• Maybe the first question should be what kind of mood you want your lighting design to convey, to best complement the works but also the ideas behind the exhibition. Should it be a warm show (thinking about more emotional states and intimacies) or cool show (thinking more technically about the materials, perhaps a more analytical mood)? If you are able to, check how many bulbs you have available and if you need additional lights, order it as soon as possible.