There’s something familiar about Sanford Kogan’s pieces, even if you’ve never laid eyes on them before. Looking at his light sculptures, you might immediately feel delighted or intrigued. Gaze long enough, and your mind will start to identify parts of the whole. “Are those tiny perfume bottles?” you might ask, or maybe, “Is that a cheese grater?”
“To see these objects in an artistic context is fun because you go, ‘Oh! That’s a clarinet!’ or ‘That’s a saxophone!’ ” Kogan says.
The forms he creates out of everyday objects serve as his canvas, with light as his color palette. In Kogan’s “Glass Washboard” series, for example, light from neon-colored LEDs refracts through wavy glass, giving viewers a different experience depending on which angle they’re looking from.
“Pigment on a canvas either absorbs light or reflects it, and the different colors you see in a painting are because of the reflection of the light,” Kogan says. “With light art, there’s a whole other dimension, which is the transmission of light and the results of that transmission.”
Initially inspired by “the beauty of musical instruments,” the self-taught artist focused on form more than light in his earliest work, taking old instruments and giving them a second life as “functional objects that emitted light.”
“Many of the processes and techniques that I use I discovered ... over decades of trial and error,” Kogan says.
The floor-to-ceiling shelves of his workshop, occupying the former master bedroom of his home in the Fan, are filled with hundreds of plastic bins, numbered and catalogued by the contents within — dentistry tools, broken pocket watches and optometry devices, to name a few categories. He amassed most of the collection during his 18 years living in Grenoble, France, where he worked as a program manager for computer hardware giant Hewlett-Packard.
In his piece “Outer Limits,” a light source beneath what looks like the back half of an inverted knee-high mesh boot — a contraption early 20th-century skiers would’ve donned temporarily for a broken leg — casts a peculiar shadow on the ceiling. Strategically placed objects on the “boot” inform the dark spaces between the projected light; the result is a smiley face.
In “Silent Siren at 16 RPM,” a seemingly infinite number of mirrors reflect white LEDs while bulbs flicker in time with the sculpture’s rotating focal point as it makes contact with copper wire. It’s one of Kogan’s “kinetic explorations” — pieces he creates by drawing on his computer science degree and his background in engineering.
“The engineering is in service of the aesthetic,” Kogan says. “For me it’s about making something beautiful and lovely.”
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Light It Up - Richmond magazine
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