Light Boxes
Installation, 2013 — The Black Box Theater, The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY
Installation, 2013 — The Black Box Theater, The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY
Light Boxes are a series of small, interactive installations designed to reveal the sculptural potential of reflection. Within each box, a simple optical system—light source, reflector, and architectural screen—creates projected drawings that shift as the reflector slowly rotates. Viewers peer through a small aperture to observe the reflecting plane, while the projections themselves are cast onto an interior surface.
The light drawings are not fixed; they emerge and evolve in response to subtle changes in alignment and curvature. What unfolds is a temporal visual event—momentary compositions that hover between image and motion.
Designed by Yael Erel, the project was developed with early collaboration from Erin Ryan and exhibited in Revealing Lightscapes and Subliminal Transcriptions. It was supported by research from RPI Architecture students Emily Broadbent, Elizabeth Lee, and Erin Butler, and with earlier contributions from M.Arch students Jessica Hernandez and Sahar Mihandoust. The work was advised by Ted Krueger and Michael Oatman.
Dimensions: 14″ × 8″ × 8″
Photography and videography by Avner BenNatan, Yael Erel, Joey Falla, Michael Oatman, and Che Wei Wang.
featured in
Subliminal Transcriptions is an exhibition based on the amplification of minuscule environmental conditions that are generally overlooked, resulting in a transcription of the topography of the reflector into light drawings.
As the viewers enters the exhibit they can see the light drawings produced before witnessing the projection mechanism. As they enter deeper into the space, they are exposed to the mechanisms and can explore the light in the space with hand held screens.
The exhibition, which was hosted by the Arts Center of the Capital Region, was the conclusion of Erel's graduate research in architecture and light at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture.
Installation by Yael Erel
The Black Box Theater - The Arts Center of the Capital Region's (Troy, NY) - June 2013
Advisors: Ted Krueger and Michael Oatman.
Sound: by Torben Pastore and Pauline Oliveros' Expanded Instrument System
Special thanks to the staff and faculty at the Lighting Research Center and the RPI Architecture School, Ed Bear, Martin Overington, Jean Paul Freyssinier, Ute Besenecker, Erin Ryan, Joey Falla, Fleet Hower, Ralph Ghoche, Bill Bergman and the RPI Architecture School Fabrication Shop, Jonas Braasch and Dean Evan Douglis, Avner Ben Natan and lightexture, Royah Ansari and The Arts Center of the Capital Region.
Revealing Lightscapes is an interactive light exhibition at The Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY. The installation, primarily targeted to young viewers, explores the principles of reflection through interaction and play.
The exhibition reveals different micro topographies of reflective surfaces as projected light drawings. The exhibition is an immersive laboratory composed of elements at various scales, each one using a light source, a reflective surface, and a screen to magnify minuscule atmospheric conditions that are normally overlooked.
The exhibition is grounded in direct physical phenomena that challenges the liminal nature of our senses - though we understand that a surface contains events at a micro-scale which we cannot easily detect with our eyes, when they are transcribed through a simple act of reflection, they become tactile and otherworldly.