Last year’s Houston, Texas’ Day For Night Festival participant, Matthew Schreiber, is a visual artist that works with light, space, and holography. His work is based on geometry, physics, and the occult. Based in New York, Schreiber also worked as a lighting expert for James Turrell.
An expert in holography, Schreiber’s installations, mould lights in thin air. The immaterial that appears to be tangible, is an illusion of his calculated lights alignments and structures. His intense use of dark primary colours takes the audience to a third-world dimension. He applies an unstated technique where the audience could step into the laser lights and experience the space in multiple perspectives. The carefully formulated environment activates a total use of our senses.
The artist has always been attracted to Sci-Fi films and art that relates to futuristic technologies. He started exploring holograms in college and the experience was so mind-blowing that he began to combine the principles of it in optics with his installations. When Schreiber started Hologram back three decades ago, no one was working with the concept. His first lab was a sensory deprivation chamber in a secluded area in Chicago. Like most artists, he finds the isolation meditative. Naturally, laser lights became the main ingredient of his work as that is what makes holograms. He stated that his installations did not come from laser lights itself, but from the Physic principles of holograms. That is also what makes the tangibility of his work difficult to grasp. Geometry is really crucial for Schreiber’s work as light travels in a straight line. His large-scale pieces are at times site-specific and take into consideration of what already exists. The piece created this year for Day For Night Festival is made of around 230 lasers and was exhibited with no animation nor sound. The lights are presented as one ‘object’.
