Valeska Soares
Brazilian, 1957- (active USA)

Vaga Lume, 2006
Mixed media
39 ½ x 39 ½ in. each unit, variable dimension

Collection: David A. Teiger

COMMENTS

Vagalume is comprised of hundreds of individual commercial bulbs of warm yellow light anchored overhead into the ceiling; each of the light bulbs may be turned on or off by a beaded chain which extends vertically from ceiling to floor. These beaded chains completely fill the space, creating a repeated series of veils that produce a sense of discovery as the viewer passes through the installation. Soares describes one’s physical experience of Vagalume as, “almost like being in the middle of a waterfall, looking at constellations in the sky.” In English, Vagalume means ‘firefly’. The title also suggests a light that is subtle, wandering, or creating new directions.

Vagalume is an environment that is activated by the spectator presence--an important theme in many of Soares’s works. Sometimes Soares achieves this sense of activation by creating an absence for the observer to fill, such as in Love Stories (2008) in which a title and blank page are cues for the viewer to envision a personal story; the same is truth on her ongoing series of carved marble pillows and mattresses entitled
After.

Vagalume shares the imaginative and poetic qualities of these works while heightening the participant physical relationship to the creative process through the sense of touch; as the viewer walks through the cascade of beads within the space, he or she can also pull on the chains to turn the bulbs on and off. In this action, the viewer illuminates a complex visual composition that may change each time a new person enters into the work.

The art historical references of Vagalume are wide-ranging. The work recalls the vaulted ceilings of pre-Renaissance chapels in which midnight blue gives way to the starry heavens, Arte Povera works that explore the possibilities of energy and light in three-dimensional space, Ernesto Neto’s environments which envelop the viewer in surreal, sensorial, and elongated physical forms, or even Dan Flavin’s explorations of available commercial lighting. Soares often lends a baroque sense of theatricality to a minimalist aesthetic where the notions of dreaming, play an important role.

Vagalume exists in time as it changes constantly.

- Valeska Soares, Portfolio, 2013, p. 22