Process

Video

The Vision of St. John the Divine

1984-1986
Assemblage with pulsed neon
66 x 34 x 32 inches
Neon pulses at two frequencies.
Collection of Benito Huerta

I remember the parts for this sculpture laid out on my workbench, which was the entirety of my first studio/kitchen in The Heights (Houston). I was twenty-two. My deep love of surrealism may have already been obvious then, and to this day I still consider myself a surrealist, however passé that may seem. I borrowed content from that biblical surrealist St. John of Patmos, illustrating the wrath of God through sculptural interpretation. I had just began to play with electricity in my first assemblage using a high voltage neon sign transformer that I absconded from a neon sign dump to make sparks, and had met some neon sign makers and other science types in the process who took an interest in my futzing about. I managed to talk Tim Walker, owner of The Neon Gallery in Houston, into making the coiled neon tube for me. He later invented an awesome lightning tube that spun swirling streams of plasma and sold them thru Sharper Image; a revision of Tesla’s lightning globes Larry Albright made famous in the 1970s, now common in novelty shops today. I later met and showed with Albright at the Museum of Neon Art in LA with this piece and visited him at his studio/laboratory. Another Houston engineer, Coley Wood, designed and helped me create an electronic transformer that would pulse my newly coiled neon tube at alternating speeds, affecting the gasses in the tube; altering reds, blues and violets into unique patterns. Something I don’t think had been done up till then. He taught me a lot about electronics and how to solder correctly.