jacob’dream: a luminous path

source: gracecathedralorg
Every year we offer a residency to an artist or artists who creates work that illuminates the cathedral’s annual theme, amplifying the cathedral’s vision, mission and goals. We have an Artist in Residence program because we believe in the power of art to inspire people and we want to make art accessible to everyone.
In 2016, reflecting the cathedral’s annual theme of “Home,” our Artists in Residence Benjamin Bergery and Jim Campbell are creating Jacob’s Dream: A Luminous Path, an installation of light and moving images evoking a pathway between our earthly home and the unseen world.
Bergery is a French media artist and cinematographer, and Campbell is one of the most famous light artists working in America today.
Installation on view during regular open hours 8 am to 6 pm (please check the calendar for events that may affect access, like our ticketed Christmas concert series and our Christmas services.)
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source: sftravel
San Francisco-based electronic-media artist Jim Campbell creates work that combines film, light emitting diodes (LEDs) and sculptural elements. His choice of materials is often complex, and he uses them to create imagery that is allusive and open-ended. His exploration of the distinction between the analog world and its digital representation metaphorically parallels the difference between poetic understanding versus the mathematics of data.

Rather than working with highly defined images, the artist pushes the limits of perception and explores the line between representation and abstraction. He leaves it to viewers to fill in the gaps, allowing them to personalize his work to an unusual degree.

Ocean Mirror with Fragments, installed in Saunder’s Court, University of California, San Francisco, uses moving images of waves in the Pacific Ocean, recorded from a point directly west of the artwork to create a mirror image. The low-resolution LED display is contained within a freestanding six-by-six-foot glass wall, and seven glass cubes scattered within the garden also have LEDs in them, each synchronized to a different block of the display grid. The movement within and between these scattered glass cubes creates the effect of the ocean waves going beyond the display into the garden area.

Jacob’s Dream: A Luminous Path is an installation of light and moving images designed to evoke a pathway between earth and heaven, between the visible and invisible, as we continue exploring our “Home” theme.