Charlie Michaels Creates Ephemeral Installation for ArtPrize, Grand Rapids

After dusk on Wednesday September 19^th, 78 sky lanterns will be lit to rise above Calder Plaza in downtown Grand Rapids. Tethered to the ground below, the lanterns will hover in the air — their colors and arrangement in the sky based on a photograph of the sun setting over Lake Michigan. The performative event of the launch will be highly choreographed and the entire sculpture only visible for a few minutes until the flames begin to burn out. As the flames extinguish, the lanterns will fall slowly back to the ground — mimicking the way colors fall slowly behind the horizon. Part of the Public Exhibition, Actions : Mutations : Revisions : Formations by Adoration Detroit for ArtPrize. 

The Adoration exhibition is a dual-location project anchored in downtown Grand Rapids at Calder (Vandenberg) Plaza, an unassuming, yet vast, concrete space in Grand Rapids’ municipal district with a backdrop of banks, City, State and Federal offices, and two monumental public sculptures core to the canon of modern art. Additionally, Adoration has taken on the challenge of curating the Grand Rapids Police Department. The GRPD will serve as a stage for an ongoing video installation that documents the happenings and events programmed for Calder Plaza. The two locales will be linked through the exhibit’s programming by the artifacts of captured video and social media.

http://​www​.ado​ra​tionde​troit​.com/
http://​www​.char​lie​-michaels​.com