"Leo Villareal's latest artwork is so big that, in order to step back from the metaphorical easel and take it all in, he needs to be ten blocks away and 42 stories up. Atop a tower near Bryant Park, reachable by two service-elevator rides and down a concrete hallway, his temporary workspace is, apart from his own presence, pretty artless."
"Villareal works principally in the form of light installations, and for its new building, JPMorgan Chase commissioned an immense one. Celestial Passage is a swimming animated display on 181,200 small groups of LEDs, each functioning as an individually controllable one-by-six-inch pixel. They create patterns on the building's surface that slowly drift and dissolve into one another. (Every one of those pixels contains eight little clumps of LEDs, a quarter-inch across, so Villareal has nearly a million and a half lights to play with.)"
Leo Villareal produces large-scale light installations and created Celestial Passage for JPMorgan Chase's new tower. The work uses 181,200 small groups of LEDs as one-by-six-inch pixels, with about 1.5 million individual LEDs arranged to blanket the building's top setbacks and extend down to the 29th floor. The animated sequences slowly drift and dissolve, resembling diffraction, interference, moiré, or meteor showers. Villareal operates from a temporary workspace atop a nearby tower, adjusting the display in real time via a computer and monitor. He has been testing and tweaking the array for months and will continue into the New Year.
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