Jiyoun Chang, the lighting designer for Rinde Eckert’s show “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy,” shared with us a few photos that influenced her design and wrote the following about how these pieces were incorporated into her process.
“This is one of the sculpture pieces I saw at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. They commissioned artists to use “temporary” material to make their art look like ashes – clay without further processing, dirt and such. This piece reminded me of Rinde’s project – there is a wolf and a man in charcoal, which represents “nature” and they are in an office space without natural light, which is “modern life.” This inspired me to suggested we use fluorescent lights for the show, but Rinde and Marcela felt the look of it didn’t belong to the world being created on stage. I then created a “worklight” kind of environment by using white light to open up the stage fully. It served the show in a similar way and provided flexibility. It could be used in any space from open white space to the rehearsal room, and it allows for any reality as of now on stage, where actors can be themselves without being characters.
The second and third images where taken near St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. I don’t think I have shared these pictures with Rinde, but these are images I kept going back to. One of the building near the Warehouse has animal designs made with a kind of felt material on the cement wall. It almost looks like shadows of the animals especially at night under the street lamp or moon light. I felt something about this was kind of a theatrical moments of the project.”