BURNING CREATIVITY
In an airy studio in the Los Angeles art colony known as The Brewery, Richard Wilks is attaching Medusa-like tentacles that crown his latest work of art for the Burning Man festival: “Queen Jellie.” He constructed the undulating metal sculpture — part jellyfish and part zoetrope — from plasma-cut and hand-welded steel, which form a gracefully twisting base that supports an organic-looking column topped by the jellyfish’s delicate umbrella.
When people encounter “Queen Jellie” on the Playa — the dry lakebed of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where Burning Man will take place later this summer — they will be able to manually power a rotating mirrored platform that surrounds the base of the sculpture, twirling its elegant corona. At night, Wilks plans to shine a stroboscope on the piece. When the rotation hits 24 frames/second, voila: The jellyfish will appear to levitate, and dozens of hollow cast-art resin bubbles will “float” up and down the vertical column and burble in the jellyfish’s bell. “Each bubble,” Wilks says, “is etched with one of eight symbols that speaks to a different layer of my exploration of water.”
Welcome to the art of Burning Man. Over the years, the festival has developed a reputation as many things — an exploration of community and art, a fleeting alternative civilization, a hedonistic party for rich Silicon Valley technologists getting in touch with their hippie side.
But it has also become a wellspring of spectacular art, like San Francisco artist
