Aphidoidea’s 600-foot piece is titled Spiraling Droplets. It’s designed to reveal the graceful and elegant shape and beauty of a water droplet. To take that shape and create such a massive work yields a visual experience somewhat like projecting and magnifying a minute and delicate image from beneath a microscope, or like viewing a dazzling array of distant stars magnified through a telescope. In other words, taking a small and perfect idea – water droplets – and writing them large results in an astonishing work that features two water splashes, each containing 15 illuminated water droplets. These droplets grow progressively in size and shape, mimicking still-motion images of a water drop expanding. The pattern recreates the shapes and movements of water ripples and currents. Thirty droplets will float the length of the piece over the canal waters south of the Marshall Way Bridge at the Scottsdale Waterfront.
A dream-like lighting sequence illuminates the droplets, creating the effect of natural light reflected on water. Running water, falling snow, a shower on a rainy day, and the reflections of light on a swimming pool are represented, as are larger scale water landscapes such as rainbows rising over clouds of mist and icy glaciers breaking.
Spiraling Droplets literally and figuratively reveals the variety of shapes that water can create. Liquid, crystal, gas: these mutations that water makes have within them a wide variety of forms from snowflake crystals to softly spun clouds, wavering mist, and plummeting droplets. Many of these shapes are close to intangible to human sight, and yet we know of these shapes, and the feelings they evoke. While we may have never examined the intricacies of a snowflake with the naked eye, we know how they should look, and the wintery magic they invoke. The elegant beauty of a water droplet’s pulsating shape is again, emotionally imagined, but heretofore visually uncaptured. Spiraling Droplets allows viewers to see the process of a droplet forming and falling by a kind of stop motion technique which creates still views of that precious droplet within thousandths of a second.
The Aphidoidea collective was entranced with the image and idea of a single droplet and its perfect transitions in shape and size – in a way, it’s wet universe contained in that single drop. It’s that vastness that is expanded and expressed at the astonishing exhibition in Scottsdale.
Aphidoidea itself is an art, design and architecture collective that creates site-specific art installations that engage and inspire viewers while enhancing the environment. Collective members Jesus Eduardo Magaña, Paulina Bouyer-Magana, Jackie Muñoz, and Andrew Hernandez, craft art that explores and stimulates each site, through a combination of a conceptual approach, a variety of materials, interaction and perception.
Initial site-specific installations have evolved for the collective, as their pieces have grown to include response and interaction from viewers.
Based in Los Angeles, Aphidoidea has exhibited in the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the City of Long Beach, Inner City Arts, YMCA, in the City of Santa Monica, and at Burning Man. Recent exhibits have included installations for the Coachella Music and Art Festival, and public works at the Red Rocks College Metro Station for Denver’s Regional Transportation District and the city of Golden, Colorado. In 2010, the collective created the Icup II_Synthetic Landscape, which used 4,000 paper cups and 15,000 staples, to suspend the cups and create an entirely new spatial experience. The exhibition was held at Phantom Galleries, which places temporary installations in vacant storefronts throughout the Los Angeles area. Using the ordinary material of a paper cup, the installation took that unremarkable object and transformed it into a vibrant component of an other-worldly design, an abstract landscape that literally became alive with motion through a motion/heat sensor that activated a crankshaft to rotate the cups.
Water is a more mutable form to begin with, and Aphidoidea’s blurring of the lines between art and technology should be a perfect match for such a shifting, enigmatic medium. The Aphidoidea team integrates skills in metal sculpture, intuitive architectural design, large scale art works, traditional art mediums from acrylics to water color, and found art forms. This multi-disciplinary collective utilizes materials and technologies such as CNC prototyping, 3D modeling, lighting, and interactive graphics.
Whatever their methodology, the results Aphidoidea accomplishes are magical creations that fuse technology with wonder.
- Genie Davis; Photos provided by Shoebox PR