Client: Regional Transportation District (Denver)

Overview

A permanent public art installation in Lakewood, Colorado, transforms a local train station into a place of striking beauty with ever-shifting beams of colored light. Ivan Toth Depeña’s Color Field, comprising 18 steel and concrete tree-like sculptures topped with panels of tempered, colored glass, was installed on May 17.

When illuminated by the sun’s rays, the installation casts colored shadows (of up to 100 feet long) across the station’s ramps, stairs, and walkways. At night, the colored glass is back-lit by LED lights, continuing to project abstract, kaleidoscopic fields of color in the space.

Goals

“I want the sculpture to change constantly and to have a direct relationship with the landscape and the solar system,” said Depeña in an interview with the Creators Project. “Color Field will not be the same in the morning as it will be in the afternoon. It will not be the same this week as it will be next month.”

Process

Commissioned by Denver’s RTD FasTracks, “Color Field” casts ever-changing patterns of color across 100 feet of ramps, stairs and walkways, interpreting nature’s inherent chaos and representing it as an evolving, kaleidoscopic abstraction. Made of steel, laminated and tempered colored glass and concrete that will be back lit by LEDs at night, each of “Color Fields” 18 "tree-like" structures was created using software that generates form algorithmically. For Depeña, this process insured that each sculpture and each glass lens was unique.