Craig Colorusso

If you've ever seen a kid's toy magic lantern, you'll know what's in store at State Cloud State's Kiehle gallery. A magic lantern is a lamp with a rotating base. Light filters through the shapes cut in the shade and casts kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls. Artist Craig Colorusso has enlarged upon that concept. He's turned the gallery into a giant magic lantern using 6 aluminum cubes that radiate light. They also produce an eery droning sound that Colorusso calls "Cubemusic."

St. Cloud, Minn. — Craig Colorusso's artistic epiphany came in a flash a light-- or rather, through the dappled, delicate light that danced across the walls of his bedroom. Colorusso says he watched, enraptured, for hours.
Craig Colorusso

"What drew me to the experience of seeing the sun move in the room was a big picture kind of thing-- being able to see time move in a really tangible way," he says. "Right as I can articulate what's happening, it starts to change. And them I wonder did it really happen, or did I just see something."

The 33-year old artist found an unexpected vehicle for playing around with light: four foot by four foot aluminum sheets, which he hefts across the gallery to install his piece. Colorusso says his fascination with light merged with his interest in metal a few years ago. One day, his metalworker roommate brought home a huge piece of industrial aluminum called a skeleton. Colorusso was mesmerized by the brushed aluminum, which was perforated with geometric shapes.

"The start was seeing that first skeleton and being, like, 'That's really cool, what could I do with that? What could it be other than garbage?'" Colorusso notes. "Because that's what they thought it was."

Colorusso toyed with these different ideas and decided to bring sound into the equation to round them out. He's a musician, first and foremost; he played in punk bands for years. Then he started to move in the direction of musicians like Brian Eno, Morton Feldman and Lamonte Young, who use music to create an experience and expand a space.
Setting up

Colorusso says he started to glimpse how he could construct a space with light and sound.

"I had the idea of a room that was glowing and throbbing, and the source of that would be the cubes," he explains. "How could you go from a pile of metal and guitar? I tried to bang it out, make it work."

So that's what he did.

The completed installation turns the ordinarily plain white walls of the Kiehle gallery into a seething, vibrating space. The six cubes are scattered throughout the room. A light source within each glows and dims like bonfires flaring up then dying down.

The light throws a lace-like pattern across the ceiling, floors and walls. Then, when it dims, everything wraps in shadows.

The droning chords emanating from each cube seem to carve out the space and then fill it up again.
Lit cubes

The effect is a kind of sanctuary, according to St. Cloud State visiting art professor Vladimir Havlik. He says the music evokes a choir, and the light suggests stained glass windows. And, he says, it's all done with minimalist panache.

"It's a sort of church or cathedral of the future," Havlik notes.

Eleven year old Margeret Wollenzien, whose dad teaches in the music department, hears it differently.

"It's just not something you'd hear every day," she shrugs. "It sounds like something the stereo did when it's not working properly."

As visitors move around the room, light dances across their faces. Time seems slowed down by the plodding, droning music, then sped up by the sudden unexpected disappearance of light.

Colorusso says you can't isolate which single factor the piece is really about.

"Cubemusic is the six cubes and the sound and light that comes from them," Colorusso says. "But the piece is the room, and it changes everywhere I go."

And it changes within the space, too. As the light waxes and wanes and the music undulates, each moment of Cubemusic is something altogether new.

- MPR