Louis Cork Marcheschi
Flint Hills Apparition, 1993
Neon, aluminum, acrylic
Museum Commission
Close your eyes and imagine sitting in a darkened movie theater in the 1950s. Feel the velvet upholstery of the chair, smell the buttery popcorn around you. Somewhere behind you, the brilliant flare of a struck match, the sulfurous waft of the smoke, the sound of a shaking wrist as it is extinguished. And then the red, glowing circle of the cigarette’s tip against the blackness, a counterpoint to the dazzling screen in front of you.
This is one of many sensory experiences that artist Louis Cork Marcheschi uses to explain his fascination with light. He also describes fireflies flashing in a foggy dusk, the flickering flames of votive candles, and liquor bottles filled with colored water, casting light from the sunny window behind them.
Flint Hills Apparition was commissioned by the Ulrich Museum in 1992, to play with and highlight the skybridges linking the two halves of the McKnight Art Center. The form was inspired not just by the architecture, but by an earlier trip the artist made to Wichita in the 1970s. During that time, he toured the nearby Flint Hills, but somehow missed the hills in the subtly sinuous landscape. He concluded that those hills were only an apparition.
The sculpture changes in daytime and nighttime. In Marcheschi's words, “Now, close to 60 years later, I have started to understand that what I am interested in is the edge, the vague area where darkness and light extinguish each other... It is the glow that fascinates me...”