By Michael S. Eddy
photos by Connor Sullivan
A wonderfully unique stroll was had, walking through Enlighten, a holiday light spectacle that brightened the winterscape of the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, MI. The immersive 1-mile experience featured the lighting work of the design collective, Lightswitch. The beloved Meijer Gardens were created by Fred and Lena Meijer, of the Meijer grocery chain to give back to the community where they started. The Enlighten experience builds on that concept of giving back during the holiday season. Co-Creative Directors John Featherstone and Collin Mulligan led the Lightswitch team, which is already well known for massive garden lighting projects, including The Morton Arboretum, Descanso Gardens, Fair Oaks Farm, and other projects where light transforms the landscape. The team at the Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, which has a collection of large-scale exterior sculptures, wanted an elevated, bespoke experience for their guests, and Lightswitch, along with vendor partner Upstaging, definitely delivered.
“Meijer Gardens is a truly remarkable institution full of a world-class sculptural art collection throughout their gardens, along with a fabulous visitor’s center,” says Featherstone. “It’s a remarkable facility. They started by taking this notion of being an advocate and asset for the arts community in the Grand Rapids region. Their new President & CEO Charles Burke and COO Carol Kendra wanted to really elevate their garden holiday experience to the same level as their world-class sculpture experience. They have had a simple light show for the last few years, but there was a bit of a disconnect between the sculpture collection and the light show illuminating the gardens. They turned to us, based on our work primarily with the Morton Arboretum, Descanso Gardens, and the Gaylord Hotel chain to help them craft a bespoke, elevated garden experience. One of the things that’s different about the work that Lightswitch does in the garden show space is—and there’s no right or wrong, just different—is we do not do what a lot of people refer to as ‘box shows.’ There are a number of these shows which are kit lightscapes that are largely the same everywhere. There’s nothing wrong with them; it’s just a good contrast to the way we work. We prefer to lean into the personality, ethos, and physical structure of the gardens with whom we work and create something unique and bespoke.”
Mulligan agrees, adding, “Where we deliver is, our work is very site-specific. So, we took everything that already existed in the Meijer Gardens, and we interpreted that. We asked ourselves, ‘How do we make a light show that is hyper-specific to Meijer Gardens—that can only exist at Meijer Gardens?’—and we went from there. The team from Meijer left the storytelling with light entirely in our court; to design the experience for them. They, of course, gave us feedback on what they liked and what they didn’t like.” Both Mulligan and Featherstone felt that the direct pathway of communication between the Lightswitch team and the Meijer team made the process go quickly and smoothly. “We were honored to be able to light—and present the art to guests—in a way they’re not used to seeing it because Meijer Gardens, with exceptions of Tuesdays, is not usually open at night,” says Featherstone. “In the past, their lighting has been functional more than celebratory. This was something new, unique for their guests.”
Musical Notes
Throughout the year, music and musical events are a big part of Meijer Gardens’ programs. They have an outdoor amphitheater that hosts musical performances and many of the sculptures that Lightswitch chose to focus on for the Enlighten project were related to music. The lighting and interactive installations reinforce the theme of music throughout the experience as there was a rich, musical thread for Lightswitch to mine for their designs for Meijer Gardens’ Enlighten.
“There’s a sculptural piece called Aria by Alexander Liberman, as well as a piece Scarlatti by Mark di Suvero named after Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti,” explains Mulligan. “From a base concept level, there is a lot of music owing through these art pieces, so many of our interactive elements are music-based. We have some butterfly chimes that can cause light activations through oversized dandelions. We chose butterflies because every April, Meijer Gardens releases 8,000 butterflies into their tropical conservatory. The chimes are off-the-shelf playground equipment, and we worked with Bruce Wheaton, who designed microphone sensors so that when the butterfly chimes are struck, it sends a signal to the lighting control system to respond. We were able to get feedback from his sensors to trigger lighting on the six-foot dandelions. At Aria, we have a keyboard we designed and Upstaging fabricated. It uses multiple button interfaces, also from Bruce Wheaton. It’s cut metal to look like the sculpture. When the audience hits the keyboard, they are really playing the sculpture like an instrument, both with light and with single notes, so it’s a polyphonic station. You could curate a piece of music by combining the various buttons. This invites play and exploration that’s focused not only on light but also on music honoring the name of the piece—Aria.”
At Neuron, by artist Roxy Paine, Lightswitch has created two interactive stations. “They’re internally lit LED pieces that resemble a mitten and a snowflake, and as the guest raises or lowers their hand between the mitten and the snowflake, they are controlling the lights around Neuron like they’re playing a Theremin,” says Mulligan. “They can manipulate color and intensity as they move their hands over the sensors. Those sensors were built for us by Sasha Laue, who is a part of the Hans Zimmer tour where John is the lighting designer.” The mitten and snowflake stands were also fabricated by Upstaging.
Throughout the sculpture park, the design team created a series of vignettes that are rather large in scale as a part of the overall show. “It’s a rich collection and some of these pieces are massive,” says Featherstone. “The Aria piece Collin mentioned, it’s the size of a four-bedroom family home in the footprint of that piece. We treated the different areas like rooms inside the experience, so we worked to make sure that every room felt like it was responding to the aesthetic of the particular work of art that felt authentic and natural but was as different from each other just as the works of art are from each other. Neuron, which is similar in size to the large Aria, looks like a neuron from the brain and is bright chrome and super cool high-tech, whereas Scarlatti is a behemoth of rusted metal and an imposing piece that looms over the audience. They needed different techniques to work. In many ways this is a concert that as you move around the campus you get a different song with each of these works of art and the way that they are lit and curated, but it still feels like a whole concert that is speaking with the voice of the Meijer Gardens.”
There are two places where the Lightswitch team used timecode to synchronize the lighting to a music track. “This was another area where we really leaned into and incorporated a classical musical feel with the environment,” comments Mulligan. “For their amphitheater, we turned the perspective on its head so that the audience crosses over the stage, and we have a symphony arrangement of light fixtures in the normal audience seating area. And then at their waterfall, which they keep heated so it runs all winter long, we just stacked that up with moving lights and lasers. The waterfall was really the showstopper for us.”
Featherstone adds a shoutout to “our friend, Dustin Derry from Stone Wolf, who programmed the lasers for us. He did a remarkable job for us on this project. It’s all about finding areas that acknowledge how the space works. People linger at the amphitheater, so we wanted to put an experience there that invited people to sit and watch something. That was Collin’s idea; to flip the way you view an amphitheater. During their summer concert series, guests sit in the audience and watch the show on the stage; here, it was flipped to look out at the lights. Also, waterfalls are another place where guests tend to linger a bit longer in their journey, so we wanted to turn that into a real showpiece. Most water features in colder environments are a challenge in winter months. When they told us that they don’t turn on their waterfall, we were very excited to embrace that as part of the visual vocabulary.”
Key Gear Choices
In terms of numbers, there are well over 1,000 lighting units, hundreds of feet of LED tape, along with another 1,000 other LED light sources scattered over the many acres of Enlighten. Lightswitch partnered closely with Upstaging to provide not only the rental lighting units but to design, fabricate, and supervise the installation of power and data networks and fabricate many of the interactive control elements for the guests to connect with the lighting throughout the experience.
“In terms of gear choices, we had an extensive number of Chauvet Color STRIKE Ms,” says Mulligan. “At first, I was hesitant to use them, because as blinders go, they have a wide beam angle, and I was concerned about a lot of glare coming from those units. But where they worked really effectively was pointing at a line of trees or foliage and just blasting light in a really clean, evenly distributed way with super-saturated colors. It was the fixture that I wasn’t sure about, but in the end, I was very impressed with it and our use of it, which I think was largely successful.” Featherstone also noted that he liked the Color STRIKE Ms a lot. “For picking out areas, we used a lot of Elation SOL Blinders,” continues Mulligan. “We went with the Blinder lens this year, but for next year, we’ll flip them to the Fresnel lens for a little more control. I mean, the quality of light is great, I just think we need a little more control out of those. We had a ton of ACME fixtures as well. Everything was IP65-rated for weather protection.”
During the design collaboration with Lightswitch, the Meijer team requested a big ‘ eld of owers’ with a pixel installation across a large meadow, “so we used [TMB Intelligent Marquee Systems] IMS fixtures under the large Scarlatti sculpture,” explains Mulligan. In addition to the IMS festoon strings and traditional lighting fixtures, the Lightswitch team used a lot of LED tape, in different form factors. “We had an incredible amount of LED tape from a company called Potato,” Mulligan continues. “Easily over 700 meters of RGB LED products between the spheres surrounding The American Horse [by Nina Akamu] and the connective tissue, the squiggles lining along the trails. We also used that LED product on an entry archway, which caused a bit of an issue because everyone wants to clog up the trail to take their Instagram pictures in the archway.” Featherstone appreciated that the Potato product came in some different form factors, saying “One of the things that they made that we really like is something that’s about the same dimension as a chunky garden hose and has very even distribution. That’s a great form factor for this kind of project; it’s not a candy cane, but it has more mass than traditional LED tape.” The team also employed custom LED Reeds that are 2-meter-long LED stalks and Upstaging’s LED-ringed Orbs in particular places throughout the experience.
All the lighting installations for Enlighten were controlled via an MA Lighting grandMA3 control network. “This was the first year that Lightswitch switched all our garden shows over to the MA3 infrastructure. It was very successful,” comments Featherstone, “and we’d like to give a big shoutout to Connor Sullivan of So Midwest who joined us as a part of the design team and did an amazing job creating a giant control network for us to run everything.”
Partner Support
As mentioned, for the Enlighten experience at Meijer Gardens, the Lightswitch team partnered with Upstaging to provide equipment, fabrication, and installation services. “We have a very partner-based philosophy for our garden shows, and we worked closely with Upstaging on this one,” explains Featherstone. “We partner very early in the design process with a strong vendor partner because we need to lean into them not only from an inventory standpoint, but also there’s a ton of custom and bespoke manufacturing that has to happen for these shows. Everything from pieces which Collin and I designed, which were built by Upstaging, the aforementioned Potato Lighting LED products, a whole bunch of LED Reeds, with two meters of linear LED output, but also all the data distribution. And in Upstaging’s case, the astonishing work they did, creating the remarkable interactive stations for this project. All that needs to be built as part of the ongoing process. Ryan Breneisen from Upstaging, who was the project director for this, did a lot of infrastructure work as well, essentially doubling the power on-site. When we did the first site survey, the park had 600A. By the time we got onsite, they had added a 400A station to the center of the property and another couple 100A stations at points that could really help our project. In addition to proposing bringing in generators, we did show them that would be a yearly rental, whereas doing the power upgrade could be balanced across however many years they want to do this experience, which hopefully will be many.”
Featherstone elaborates on budgeting, “Our big philosophy with these shows is that we very much design to a budget rather than budget to design,” he states. “It keeps the timeline efficient, and it keeps the process on point. It means we don’t go down rabbit holes with the clients where they get all excited about something they subsequently can’t afford. And it also gives a vendor the opportunity to balance the equation of the trinity of labor costs, equipment rental costs, and manufacturing costs. Frankly, one of the things that we love about all of our vendor partners is they really work with us on a ‘not to exceed’ basis. Throughout the project, Meijer Gardens would check in on the budget; look for updates to it. We had to keep reminding them ‘it’s what we told you it was in the beginning, because that’s what we do.’ Ryan and the whole Upstaging team did an amazing job of putting things together and helping us stay on track; stay aligned not only with our creative vision, and the goals of Meijer Gardens, but also the budget.”
Featherstone and Mulligan and the whole Lightswitch team are celebrating the warm reception guests have been giving to Enlighten at Meijer Gardens. “I think that the way we approach all of these projects is with a great sense of honor and privilege,” states Featherstone. “These institutions turn to Lightswitch to effectively become their brand ambassadors and to deliver a message to the community, which is a physical and experiential manifestation of their brand pledge. When Meijer Gardens turned to us and asked us to help present a show for them, which celebrates their role in the community as a site for the intersection between art, nature, and the human experience, we take that really seriously. This isn’t just a bunch of lights, even though it is a bunch of lights. It’s also about creating something that is a differentiated human experience. We talk a lot about the notion of emotional souvenirs. We don’t take that lightly, and there’s a lot of horsepower creatively that goes into these experiences.”
Mulligan echoes much of what Featherstone says, adding, “As John said, the experience is an honor. We’re lighting world-renowned sculptor’s pieces. We really are our toughest critics. It’s the open-endedness of this where they’d say, ‘make this look beautiful.’ That really drove us to do it in a way that we are most proud of as designers ourselves.”
The project was a whole team effort from Lightswitch, Featherstone wants to be sure to note. “Collin and I led the design charge on this project, but we did bring in the whole Lightswitch team. All this body of experience at Lightswitch comes together under our ‘it takes a village’ design ethos to make sure that we are delivering the best possible experience we can and the best possible product to our clients. When we have a client like Meijer Gardens who says to us, ‘we are going to tell you about us. Now we are going to trust you to go away and create something amazing that represents us.’ It’s a high degree of trust, and we all at Lightswitch take that extremely seriously. Fortunately, it seems we knocked this one out of the park as the reviews have been fantastic.”