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Lightswitch illuminates nighttime experience in Wisconsin with Elation

“The Nature of Light: An Exploration After Dark”, a new immersive nighttime experience at The Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was created by visual design practice Lightswitch in partnership with art sculpture studio Hybycozo and the Paine. It uses a host of Elation Professional fixtures in a number of transformative outdoor environments.

For nearly a decade, Hybycozo and Lightswitch have partnered on art installations and experiences but “The Nature of Light: An Exploration After Dark” is their first collaboration on a major large-scale exhibition. It features a collection of carefully curated experiences throughout the estate and grounds, lit indoor and outdoor environments that incorporate more than fifty unique sculptures.

The project began when Aaron Sherer, Executive Director at the Paine, approached Lightswitch Principal John Featherstone with a new idea. Familiar with Lightswitch’s work on “Illumination - Tree Lights at The Morton Arboretum” in Illinois, Sherer wanted to highlight the Paine’s Tudor-style mansion and botanical gardens in a unique way yet wanted something different from the annual holiday-centered light installations. His vision was to create an exclusive, one-off experience centered around light, art and nature in a way that celebrated the Paine’s grounds.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the English-inspired country estate is just over three acres in size. The modest size of the grounds allowed Lightswitch to create a compact and intimate outdoor experience. The design firm had the opportunity to explore the lighting of the inside of the mansion as well.

The garden designs are essentially a number of outdoor “rooms”. Like the Paine mansion’s rooms and galleries, the gardens are designed to create a variety of intimate and grand settings. “The Nature of Light” allows visitors to revel in the play of color and texture on native Wisconsin trees and shrubs and celebrate the inherent beauty of geometric form and pattern, light and shadow. Here, Lightswitch has illuminated the landscape - flora, trees, arbor, and water features - along with large-scale geometric works of art by Hybycozo, using a mix of Arena Q7 Zoom LED PAR lights, Seven PAR 7IP LED PAR wash luminaires, and Proteus Rayzor 760 LED wash effects fixtures.

The mansion itself is lit using SixBar 1000IP linear LED bars while spread around the building are five Proteus Excaliburs, 0.8-degree power beam lights that Featherstone uses to project dense beams of vertical light into the sky. “The Excaliburs echo and extend the form of the five historic chimneys of the building”, he explains. At a formal garden at the end of the guests’ journey, Proteus Hybrid moving heads provide a sky beam show by describing patterns into the night sky while at another part of the property Colour 5 Profile ellipsoidals outfitted with gobos created with Hybycozo turn the ceiling of a tent into a kaleidoscope. Intelligent Lighting Creations (ILC) supplied all of the Elation lighting for “The Nature of Light”.

Inside the mansion, the design team lit the rooms “as if some kind of mad scientist lighting guru lived in there” according to Featherstone. In one room, very narrow frequency LED fixtures create a monochrome look that strips all the color out of the room while in another area light is used to explore gender stereotypes, and more. “There are lots of interesting ways that we’re inviting people to explore the way they see things”, Featherstone concludes.

All in all, Lightswitch deployed 239 x Arena Q7 Zoom, 29 x SixBar 1000 IP, 4 x Seven PAR 7IP, 22 x Proteus Rayzor 760, 14 x Proteus Hybrid, 5 x Proteus Excalibur, and 2 x Proteus Maximus. The Lightswitch crew included Lighting & Projection Mapping Designer Austin Shapley, Lighting Director Hailey Featherstone, Lead Electrician/Project Director Steve Hiben, and Archivist Max Zimmer, along with Creative Director John Featherstone. “The Nature of Light: An Exploration After Dark” runs at The Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh until October 30, 2022.

(Photos: Elation Professional/Lightswitch)

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