Klip Collective presents Night Forms: dreamloop

Light sounds

What feels more like delineated works staged in sovereign separateness from one another during the day is pulled into relation under the cover of dark by blended areas of light and sound interacting with each other. Walking among and at times into the colored lights and projected video brings viewers an animated world that blooms and pulses and winks. Sounds emanate from a myriad of locations, collaborate in a growing sense of wonder and full sensory immersion.

There is intelligence and humor in the surprising exploitation of night’s capacity to make the familiar strange, to disguise and totally recreate experiences of landscape elements. The whole is assured, seamless, and rewards curiosity and investigation. Familiar forms seem to move, rapidly changing color and texture. The mood is by turns playful, intriguing, mysterious. There is a sensitivity and fidelity to the character of the original form, and an editorial boldness in the creation of a profoundly altered experience.

Ricardo Rivera, creative director and founder of the Philadelphia-based Klip Collective, says that the strikingly saturated hyper-realistically textured mutating illusions of dreamloop were born out of the relationship between the musical compositions and the sculpture. Each one has its own mood, emotional range, and abstracted storyline. “I do think of them as stories,” he says.

A sense of flow

Once the concepts were created, installation itself took place in a lightning-fast two weeks. Exhausted and emotional, Rivera spoke with warmth about the exceptional skill of each member of his team. The opening night of an exhibition often feels sad for him because it means the end of a period of intense creative relationship with the members of Klip Collective—they’ve become like a family.

Rivera is a pioneer of video projection mapping, and the range of effects and aesthetics speak to Klip Collective’s fluidity and fluency in an increasingly ubiquitous but still somewhat fledgling form. Klip straddles art and commercial realms, working on commission to create experiences on the behalf of institutions and brands, as well as collaborations with artists.

As a self-taught visual artist and director, his work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, including the commissioned festival bumper in 2014. Rivera directed "Nightscape: A Light and Sound Experience" at Longwood Gardens which attracted over 300,000 visitors in 2015 and 2016. He also directed "Electric Desert" at Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, 2018-2019. He has collaborated with Kurt Vile, the band Nothing, the Mural Arts Program, Temple University, Bartram’s Gardens, and a number of other Philadelphia artists and institutions.