Ingo Mauer Exhibit

I really enjoyed Ingo Mauer’s work. I appreciated how light-hearted and fun he is, I feel like there’s a lot of work that tries to be too serious. This is also a particularly good trait to have when making experimental light features. The intrinsic nature of light makes places more comfortable and welcoming, and his work certainly does that. His humor and wit can be seen immediately with the talking portraits of Carnegie and the woman. I can tell that he likes to make fun and take things out of context.
Going back to the intrinsic nature of light, he helps to create a welcoming, ‘light’ (as opposed to heavy) atmosphere by making a giant ‘flying’ ribbon as the lamp. I also liked his use of gold in his work. I am usually not a fan of gold, it feels tacky to me, but he used it in a tasteful way. I understand how he used it to emit a certain type of light into a room, a very warm, comfortable light. For this reason, I really liked his gold meditation room. I think it would have been amazing to be able to sit in it for a while and be absorbed by the light. I wonder how it would feel after long periods of time.
The beeswax table was interesting to me because unlike basically everything else he created, it had very little functionality, but I like the idea of creating a surface that reflected a certain light.
Another thing I liked about his art was how simple some of it was. Like the half-heart mirror, when a light shone on it, it created two hearts, one light and one dark. It is just very simple and very elegant. His other simple work that I really enjoyed was his light bulbs with wings. He literally made a cute little representation of light out of an ordinary light bulb. Before this exhibit, I never would have thought to look at a light bulb as something other than what it is. But he transformed the mechanical image of it into something cute and fun.
I didn’t care much for his LED work. It seemed very dated and tacky, like it was from the 80’s. I like the idea of shifting wallpaper, but the presentation didn’t do much for me. I could picture that in a tacky Asian restaurant. His benches with the LED’s floating in the glass did impress me however. It felt very post-modern and space-age, but it was again, very elegant and well executed.