Neon gets top billing in “Glow: Neon and Light,” a new exhibit at the Akron Art Museum featuring a range of artists working in the medium. Yet neon is an all-encompassing term for any gas in glass tubes. Argon, which produces the cooler colors, doesn’t quite get its due.
“It’s sort of the unknown child of the whole sign industry,” said Jeffry Chiplis of Cleveland, who creates art with recycled signage.
Neon produces the warmer reds and oranges.
“You can light up the other gases, too, like xenon and krypton. But they're both very expensive to use,” Chiplis said. “Helium and oxygen, you can also light them up, but it's very faint and not nearly as active as the argon and the neon.”
Chiplis has been working with recycled neon for long enough that people now drop off old signs on his doorstep. He has several pieces on display in the exhibit, including “View of the City Through a Keyhole,” comprised of both neon and argon.
“It was actually in a different version of this one before somebody brought me the big orange piece. And I took that old piece out because I really wasn't happy with it, put that in there. I'm going, ‘Yes. Now it works,’” he said.
Chiplis is one of nine artists featured in the show, which demonstrates different ways to create with light. Some of the artists work with a neon manufacturer, and others bend their own neon by hand, which requires precision.
Contemporary medium
Neon signage has been commanding attention for the last century, but it wasn’t until the ‘60s that artists began exploring ways to create with neon, said exhibit curator Wendy Earle.
“One of the first artists to really think about neon was Keith Sonnier, and he is in our show,” she said. “He creates these works that are sort of gestural, like a drawing."
More recently, New York-based artist Sarah Blood combined neon, surveillance mirrors and VHS tape to create “Echo.”
“You can almost imagine it might be from like security tapes that you're being watched. But it's also about how we're watching each other,” Earle said.
Inspiring sculpture
Keith Lemley, of Ravenna, created a work inspired by an unusual sight he encountered on a winter walk near his home. Breakneck Creek, a tributary of the Cuyahoga River, had flooded the forest and then the water froze.
“I came across this sort of horizon of ice in the forest, which I hadn't seen before,” he said. “Like these frozen circles of ice around trees.
For “Frost Line,” Lemley bent circles of white light that surround large tree branches that hang from floor to ceiling in the gallery.
“It changed the space that I see every day into something other, something new,” he said. “I would hope that the people visiting the gallery for the first time come in and have a similar feeling.”
“Glow: Neon and Light” is on view through Feb. 9 at the Akron Art Museum.
