Inflare, 2017

Inflare for Breathing Lights

Adjacent to the Arts Center of the Capital Region, whose vacant upper floors were part of the Breathing Lights installation. This sculpture negotiated the intimate relationship of public space and the built environment. DeWitt’s work investigates the role art plays in community and helps viewers re-experience the familiar and reevaluate their place in the urban environment.

In October and November 2016, Breathing Lights illuminated the windows of hundreds of vacant buildings in Albany, Schenectady and Troy, NY. Warm light filled each window with a diffuse glow that mimicked the gentle rhythm of human breathing. Concentrated in neighborhoods with high levels of vacancy, Breathing Lights transformed abandoned structures from pockets of shadows into places of warmth.

This unprecedented, multi-city installation also transformed public streets into an evocative experience and provided a platform to reinvigorate stakeholders around the Capital Region’s most visible symptom of decades of disinvestment. Working with dozens of community and private-sector partners, Breathing Lights included eight months of programming and events, including youth media projects, building reclamation clinics, community arts presentations, gallery talks, policy discussions and more. At the end of the installation, windows – one by one – fell dark. In sharing a sense of loss came a stir to action.

Inflare for Breathing Lights

My work and teaching, like Breathing Lights, investigates the role art plays in community. Innovative public art, with unusual forms in unexpected locations, helps us experience the familiar and reevaluate our place in the urban environment.  My projects are inextricably site specific/dependent, emphasizing the relational existence of form within contexts of material, process, public space, and collaboration. The sculptures cylindrical elements form a community of similar yet distinct individuals – an aesthetic, structural, and material ecosystem.  My sculptures are the result of a dialogue with site, client, and community.