Art Review: Electrified at Wood Street Galleries

Published: Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 6:08p.m. Updated 23 hours ago

On April 25, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Spring Gallery Crawl, Electrified will features new works by artists Edwin van der Heide and Alexandre Burton.

Each pays homage to the pioneering work of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and his experiments in electricity, X-rays and wireless communication.

The first piece visitors will come to is van der Heide's Evolving Spark Network, which is a multi-sensory installation on the gallery's second floor comprising a network of sparks, which produce sound and light.

A Dutch artist and researcher from Rotterdam, Netherlands, van der Heide has been focusing on the interaction of sound and space for several years. With this new piece, he extends composition and musical language in spatial, interactive and interdisciplinary directions.

More of an environment than an installation-type artwork, it is as much about performance as it is about spatial relationships, in that van der Heide has created an environment in which the audience is challenged to actively explore, interact with and relate to the work. In this case, as it relates to the electrical impulses by which our nerves communicate information.

Utilizing 80 identical spark bridges distributed over a standard grid suspended from the ceiling, van der Heide says it's not so much an installation in space, but you could say the space is completely transformed by the installation.

As visitors enter the space, their movements are noted by motion-detection sensors and used to activate the network. And that's where the fun begins, as dozens of sparks begin to pop and whir like dozens of little fireflies. As if in a real field filled with fireflies, complexity arises through the interrelations between the individual spark bridges.

The work results in a cosmos of sparks.

A cosmos with its own rules and behavior, van der Heide says.

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Art Review: Electrified at Wood Street Galleries