Walking into Chris Jeffrey's pop-up installation is like entering a prism. Rainbows explode on the wall. Neon green, magenta, electric blue and bright yellow slash in every direction, spilling off the edges of each piece and onto the walls, floor and ceiling. Depth and dimension are no longer sure bets. Beneath the light, ambient sounds thrum in and out, punctuated by a resonant gong.
Light-based artworks are hard to show: They require darkness, which rules out group exhibitions and sunlit galleries. That's one reason Jeffrey has installed his project in a vacant Main Street storefront in Montpelier. A sound installation by John Thomas Levee and Graham Sullivan accompanies the light works. The pop-up opens for visitors on Friday and Saturday evenings and can be seen through the window from 6 to 10 p.m. on weekdays through October. The show is untitled, as are each of its eight pieces.
To make his work, Jeffrey, who lives in Montpelier, starts with spotlights attached to one or more white panels. Then he holds up a small glass optical filter, which breaks and bends the light into different colors and sends it in new directions. Once he's happy with an effect, he secures the lens in place and repeats the process. This can be quick or take hours.
It's experimental and improvisational, Jeffrey said on a tour of the space: "I don't have any kind of a vision for what it's going to be when I start."
The industrial optical filters are made in southern Vermont for applications ranging from microscopes to night-vision goggles. For the past several years, Jeffrey was able to purchase cast-off, imperfect filters by the pound. The little pieces of glass in different shapes and sizes alter the light in unique ways, changing its color or trajectory, cutting beams short or sending them across the room. A quarter-turn or slight tilt of any filter can create an entirely new composition.
The contradiction between those subtle variations and dramatic bursts of color is at the heart of this work. Visual fireworks hit the eye right away, but close looking rewards the viewer with abundant details. There are tiny peaks and valleys in the brushstrokes of white paint on the panels, where one color hits the highlights and a different one occupies the shadows.
Jeffrey uses the space between panels to frame and interrupt strokes of light, particularly in a 12-foot-wide, 15-panel work resembling a mosaic. Here, the dark wall asserts itself between each small rectangle, messing with the viewer's sense of depth and surface.
Another work on a single 4-by-8-foot vertical panel focuses the light. Splashes of color combine in joyful constellations where the filters act as sculptural elements, protruding from each panel in little barnacle-like clusters of glass. The room in which the work is installed affects it greatly, Jeffrey said; lights and filters don't always align the same way on a different wall.
Jeffrey can be exacting in his process. But he embraces its unplanned aspects too, giving the whole installation a Zen-like quality that Levee and Sullivan reinforce with their sound design. Stretched, slow drones are overlaid with occasional short, descending melodies and a deep, resonant bell. The low frequencies are calming and otherworldly, altering time as the light alters space.
Levee is the assistant program director in game sound design at Champlain College; he and Sullivan, who graduated last spring, collaborated with Jeffrey on a sound design for "Surface/Depth," his February show at the school's art gallery. After Jeffrey traveled to Japan in May, he invited Levee and Sullivan to create a new soundscape from recordings he made there.
Of the audio components, only the bell is recognizable. Dating back to the 17th century and mentioned in a haiku by Matsuo Bash, the bell at the Sens-ji temple in Asakusa is rung every morning at 6 a.m. Jeffrey attended this ritual most of the days he was in Tokyo. He was struck not just by the bell's sound but how it reverberated through his body.
Levee enhanced those low-frequency tones for the soundscape, and the result is palpable. "People sometimes forget that sound is also a physical experience," he said. "It's physical vibrations."
Other sounds from Jeffrey's recordings — crowd noise at a baseball game, a street festival, rain — are slowed or distorted beyond recognition. Levee said he and Sullivan modified aspects of the low-quality audio from Jeffrey's iPhone videos to give them a new life, bringing out the vibrancy of the original experience without dictating a meaning.
Like the light works, the sound installation has an improvisational quality. Levee and Sullivan coded a program that chooses which sounds to play from which speaker, rather than play them on a loop. The result is endlessly different audio combinations, reflecting Jeffrey's process of combining different filters to create light effects.
The installation has a spiritual, meditative sensibility. Jeffrey worked in stained glass for about 30 years. During that time, he created mausoleum windows for monuments made of Barre granite, but he's not keen on the proscriptive nature of the stained-glass window tradition. Jeffrey's installations avoid religious imagery but do convey a sense of wonder that transcends the medium's cool physics. The vibe is somewhere between cathedral and science museum.
Jeffrey admires large-scale light installations by sculptors such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, but he noted that their work requires intensive technology and a team of fabricators. Jeffrey's approach is more personal and allows the viewer space for interpretation. It's an intuitive process, he said, almost like painting, and the results are purely abstract.
"This is just light and color," Jeffrey said. "You look at this and whatever you get out of it is yours."