Michael Jones McKean lecture: The Rainbow Project
Event Time: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 | 7:00 p.m.Additional Info
WHAT: Lecture by artist planning 2010 project at the Bemis Center
WHO: Michael Jones McKean
WHEN: Tuesday, September 15 | 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Bemis Center, 12th and Leavenworth
Please join us for a public lecture by Richmond, Virginia based artist Michael Jones McKean on his The Rainbow Project, an artwork proposed for the Bemis Center in 2010.
The Rainbow Project offers a simple, though rare visual experience: a rainbow. The project will make temporary rainbows using sunlight and water above the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Multiple times per day, for 10 to 20 minutes each, a rainbow, sometimes as large as 200 feet tall and 200 feet wide will appear above the building.
Michael Jones McKean is a former resident at the Bemis Center and current professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. For the past several years, he has conducted ongoing experiments leading to the production of a site-specific project commissioned by the Bemis Center. McKean’s work will amplify the placeless, celebratory, seductive and elusive qualities of the spectacular event of a rainbow. The Bemis Center is excited to produce this project, which could so directly capture broad public imagination and allow the contemporary arts center to have wide-ranging conversations with communities throughout Omaha.
The project will use high-powered jet pumps and custom fountain nozzles mounted to Bemis Center’s roof in downtown Omaha. The nozzles will be linked in timed bursts creating a dense water wall atop the building. A customized rooftop downspout system will allow recycling of the water. Based on atmospheric conditions, vantage point, available sunlight and the changing angle of sun in the sky throughout the day, each rainbow will have a different character and quality. One will be able to see the rainbows from thousands of feet away.
Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears fleetingly after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as one of the most egalitarian of visual experiences; one that is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. Using the most elemental materials, sunlight and water, The Rainbow Project exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.
Although the graphic symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to momentarily dislodge us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. In this sense the project occupies the small, but charged space between out-of-time retinal phenomena and the ancient continuum of cultural signification represented by the sublime. The outward simplicity of this singular image, a rainbow, belies its subtle complexity courting a multifaceted and hopefully consequential discourse.
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Michael Jones McKean lecture presenting sponsor:
Betiana and Todd Simon Foundation
Michael Jones McKean lecture event sponsors:
Upstream Brewing Co., Warren Distribution
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