Known for changing the conformation of space through her smoke bombs and fireworks, the pioneering American artist Judy Chicago continues her long running Atmospheres series, inviting global audiences to experience newly created Smoke Sculptures™ in Augmented Reality (AR).
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Judy Chicago (Chicago, 1939) is a pioneering artist, author, feminist, educator and intellectual whose career spans five decades. Her figure will be forever associated to the feminist movement of the 1960s, and, she was indeed the first to fund a feminist art program, at the University of California: an early concept of today's women empowerment, “Art making is about discovery (…). Art can empower people to act”. Having exhibited in international museums and collaborated with important brands, such as Dior, Judy Chicago does not stop experimenting. This year, at the age of 81 years old, she embraced augmented reality and social media communication, to create Rainbow AR, a project promoted in collaboration with Light Art Space - a Berlin-based non-profit foundation that connects artistic languages with science and new technologies.
During this uncertain time when public gatherings are limited and our relationships with personal and public spaces are changing, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR is accessible to audiences wherever they are based, allowing them to have their own site-specific experience, activating and ‘beautifying’ their own surroundings. Indeed, the project is inspired by the series Atmospheres (1968), through which Chicago designed a coordinated explosion of various smoke bombs and fireworks, her Smoke Sculptures: ephemeral and site-specific performances that temporarily modified the surrounding landscape, softening its contours and creating a pleasant atmosphere.
“This work is a new way to bring the experience of my Smoke Sculptures™ to audiences around the world who might not be familiar with my long-standing efforts to soften and feminise the often-harsh, patriarchal world around us” said Judy Chicago about the Rainbow AR project. “At this moment in time, it seems even more important to offer the opportunity to bathe our environments with light, art and beauty in order to inspire hope and through a visual metaphor, suggest the possibility of positive change”.
Find out more about how to download Rainbow AR by Judy Chicago here.
Cover image: Judy Chicago. Pink Atmosphere, 1971. Fireworks performance. Performed at the Cal-State Fullerton Campus, Fullerton, CA. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy of Through the Flower Archives. Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
Wrtiten by Giulia Cami
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