I want them to be like sparks of light in the darkness that will fade out ... I don’t want
them to be works of art.
Toronto artist Lisa Neighbour’s Eye on the Square is the Library & Gallery’s public art installation for 1994-95. Mounted on the library’s Queen Square entrance and measuring 16 feet by 8 feet of 3/4 inch plywood, it is shaped and painted to resemble an eye and dotted with three hundred half-inch coloured Christmas lights. The highly stylized eye is described by a dark blue retina, within which is a stencil pattern of grey-blue scrolled acanthus leaves dotted with blue lights. The iris is a pastel orange at the edge of the iris, becoming yellow as it radiates outward, and punctuated by a ring of red lights. The eye white is sky blue, becoming a darker blue at the edges, with a stencil pattern of linden boughs highlighted by white lights. The eyelid is contrasting green with red and grey-blue scrolled acanthus leaves fused beneath green lights.
In the Eye on the Square, Neighbour has adopted festival lighting for the purposes of a work of public sculpture. In so doing she has linked her public art to the tradition of public exhibitions of seasonal decoration and celebration found on every block of every town and city on this continent. Making art with coloured lights allows Neighbour to side step the traditional artist/public relationship. We all participate in an act of public art when we put up the Christmas lights. We have seen the artist, and it’s the next door neighbour.
Perhaps that’s a bit too Pollyanna. It’s more than the eye of Rudolph gazing at us like so much familiar seasonal decoration: It’s enigmatic and detached – it arrests us. It’s even somewhat mysterious. But it’s not some giant fetish object either. It’s probably not going to protect the library and it’s patrons from hexes, curses, book burners and other malicious spirits. Broadly speaking, (not to exclude other fascinating interpretations of the eye as a symbol) the eye represents seeing and being seen, which is, not coincidentally, also the point of public art.
If the public art work is to be more than, to use Tom Wolfe’s words, "a turd left behind by the architecture", it must address a general public. This is not to say that the desired effect of the art work is any different. The artist similarly evokes a number of the basic tensions of the fictional narrative: familiarity and mystery, discovery and loss, comfort and anxiety, joy and despair. Only the rhetoric has changed slightly. The contours of the image are sharper. The stylistic references and sources are less obscure. The volume is turned way up so that everybody can hear it.
Public art mingles with the larger community. The public artist chooses a site for its visibility and for the opportunity to "chat with the neighbours". At its best, public art beckons the unwary pedestrian and adds a new perspective to the surrounding environment; an artist’s perspective. With the installation of a public art work the artist says to the passerby, “You see me, seeing you.”
I was watching a construction crew setting up lights on the church at Adelaide and Bathurst streets for a Portuguese festival. To me it was like a religious experience. I felt a transcendence over the reality of the moment. It was somebody’s expression of religious belief that was happy and real. I wanted to reproduce that feeling.
Lisa Neighbour has been actively exhibiting her work since 1983. Well known for her printmaking (she is a technician and instructor in the print studio at the Ontario College of Art), she has in recent years become known for her electrified and illuminated sculpture and paintings. She first exhibited her light sculptures in an exhibition of her prints at Open Studio in 1989. In 1992 she exhibited electrically illuminated sculpture in a collaborative piece with Carlo Cesta and Fast Worms entitled Artes Moriendi at the Toronto Sculpture Garden. Her solo exhibition, In The Dark, at the Red Head Gallery in 1993, established the scope of her engagement with light sculpture. Using commercial Christmas lights like another palette colour, Neighbour combined the festive reference of the coloured lights with a mystic and enigmatic imagery inspired by methods of divination.
The light sculptures are quite different from what I did before – they go a lot deeper than other stuff I was working on. I was doing it like a form of therapy. This is how I keep myself engaged with this world and involved in being on this planet: I make art.
In The Dark took place literally in the dark – an inverted context – a darkened gallery illuminated only by the coloured lights of the sculptures. Neighbour created an uncanny atmosphere where contours may verge on invisibility and images at times seemed to pop into three dimensional relief. A lasting impression of In The Dark was that of a space reserved for secret rituals and unknown ceremonies. The Eye on the Square is a continuation of the In The Dark exhibition – a distillation of the theme of divination into the symbolically abstracted and visionary oculus. However, in creating the Eye on the Square for the exterior wall of the Library & Gallery, the surrounding exterior space has altered the sense of the art work. No longer interior visions, the coloured lights are festive and celebratory in the dusk and darkness of the city. The artist has returned to the site of the original folk art roots influence of Portuguese and Mexican festival lighting.
Are we oculmantic? Do we try to divine the future in one another’s eyes? We love eyes. Or rather, we are very attracted to them. There is something in the experience of making eye contact with another person, when someone else sees you seeing them, that seems to define what it is to be human. The human eye – the conscious, thinking, seeing human eye – represents our passage in the world. It is our witness, our fear, our suffering, our happiness our accomplishment. The eye represents the promise that every individual has a story to tell – a vision, and that every person is the artist of their own life. The eye is a metaphor of light, of consciousness out of unconsciousness, awakening from sleep, of ignorance becoming knowledge. For Lisa Neighbour the eye represents a state of harmony with the world – a benevolent vision, that is a guardian and protector and humorous appendage to a public building.
I’m pretty superstitious. The eye is a symbolic protection against the evil eye: You draw an eye over the door of your house then you are deflecting evil away from where you are . . . It’s not just the sight of it – I guess (it is also) the feeling that there is something else watching over you and that objects have a life of their own. The world is not just a blank that we are walking around in but it has its own presence that responds to you. That benevolent vision is an element of this.
Neighbour’s frequent trips to Mexico, where her mother lives, have given her a knowledge of that country’s culture and have influenced both her art work and her attitude towards religious ideas. While in art school she reacted against many of the art doctrines that were taught her and cast about trying to find out what, for her, were legitimate reasons for making art. She sought an escape from concerns and models of behaviour and thinking that didn’t seem to fit. Folk art was a source of much of the essential spirit of art that she admired.
I remembered as a young kid making art for the sheer pleasure of seeing things become real at the end of my fingertips. The light sculptures were a reaction to the whole art world as I was beginning to understand it . . .
The unveiling of a public art work involves a degree of personal exposure and risk for an artist that is a magnification of the experience of a gallery exhibition. For Lisa Neighbour, the Eye on the Square is an expression of joy and comfort and mystery. It is a very public display of a very individual and personal vision.
Eye on the Square by Lisa Neighbour
October 1994 – August 1995
The Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ont.
Gordon Hatt, 1994
