The Los Angeles County Museum of Art would debut “Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014” in the middle of a record-shattering heat wave. John Gerrard’s installation is a digital simulation of a solar thermal power plant in the Nevada desert – a twenty-four-foot-tall wall of tiny LEDs. He used gaming technology to create a virtual world that mimics the positions of the sun, in real time, over the Solar Reserve site during the course of a year – an aerial view of...
more »The Los Angeles County Museum of Art would debut “Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014” in the middle of a record-shattering heat wave. John Gerrard’s installation is a digital simulation of a solar thermal power plant in the Nevada desert – a twenty-four-foot-tall wall of tiny LEDs. He used gaming technology to create a virtual world that mimics the positions of the sun, in real time, over the Solar Reserve site during the course of a year – an aerial view of the power plant and concentric circles of tile-like mirrors with a collection tower at the center. The image morphs throughout the day as the power plant’s 10,000 mirrors continuously shift, tracking the sun. It's a bit mesmerizing. It's a bit scary. It was originally commissioned by New York’s Public Art Fund, which presented it at Lincoln Center in 2014, but it hasn’t been seen anywhere since. Leonardo DiCaprio purchased it as a gift for the museum and it fits right in here, in sun-blasted Los Angeles. And it matches Renzo Piano's severe postindustrial museum right there too. There's too much sun here. ~ Thursday, July 12, 2018
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