Percent for the art

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Singapore, 1^st August 2014

Australia has a Percent for the Art scheme that require any developer, whether private or government, to spend a percentage of the development costs on art. The policy requires the developers to allocate 1 percent of the construction costs above $2 million to be spent on developing exciting artworks on public buildings, schools, public infrastructure etc. The thought behind is twofold, not only does it stimulate and support the local artists but it also enhances the built environment with nice artworks.

We have been involved with these schemes through our relationship with artists notably and one such project was recently commissioned. We received the official photography a few days ago and being the end of this week I thought of sharing this with you. For this project we worked together with Rick Vermey, a well-known and established visual artist in Western Australia. The brief that Rick received was to develop an artwork that would enhance and create some buzz on two, otherwise pretty nondescript, sound walls, that were being built to screen off the adjacent residential area as part of major road reconstructions.

As Rick developed his idea of using graphically perforated steel to depict locally relevant imagery this quickly fermented into the use of lighting as a major element in the artwork. Rick and I, who know each other from other successful collaborations in the past, sat down to develop a lighting concept that would not only validate and enhance the artwork to greater heights, but in the process also stringently keep an eye on road and public safety. The result is a lighting design with amazing visual effects which brings an element of pleasance and peacefulness in an otherwise nondescript amenity wall.

While initially designed to be just a white backlight, the client became excited about the prospect of using colours after seeing one of our demonstartions and subsequently the budget was increased to allow for full DMX controlled lighting effects. A colour scheme was developed in respect to the local indigenous calendar where 6 different colours represent the 6 different seasons of the Nnoongar people. To further assure public safety we designed the timing of the colour changes to fade gently with running times that runs exactly parallel to the traffic light stopping times. The result are some stunning images that have brought a sense of proudness to the local residents…I myself am very pleased with the end result which is a fine display of art and lighting combined with sustainable cutting edge lighting technology.

Light watch 5-127: Here are the images…have a great weekend!