Every Sculpture Tells a Story
​Untitled, Rockne Krebs, 1966

-HK

The video on Facebook for a full screen viewing.

www.facebook.com/629362525/videos/1486587998627681/

GO USA Paris Olympics

These two art installations were created using the cutting edge laser technology of their time. Canis Major was originally created with the still very new lasers available in the early 1970s and Good Luck World,1996, was created using a new computer animation program for laser projections.

Canis Major and Good Luck World, Rockne Krebs, 1996, CNN Center, Atlanta, GA, in celebration of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Krebs recreated his 1973-1976 laser sculpture, Canis Major, in what was originally (newly constructed) the Omni International Complex (now the CNN Center and Omni Atlanta Hotel at Centennial Park) and created Good Luck World for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. Good Luck World, a computer animated laser projection on the CNN Center atrium ceiling was 100 x 150 feet.

#rocknekrebs #publicart #olympicsAtlanta #artandtechnology #sciart #laserart #laseranimation #artpioneer #laserprojection #1996Olympics #CNNCenter #artinstallation #lightartist #1996SummerOlympics #artfortheolympics #lightart #earlylasers #1970sart #monumentalart #lightandspace #drawinginthesky #linesoflight #immateriality #SculptureMinusObject #minimalism #ephemeralart #minimalisminmotion

"My first exhibit was at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1968. The room was 25 x 21 x 11 feet high. I mention the size of the enclosure because to me I am trying to deal with the six planes, the enclosures through which our bodies move, and use light as a
​medium in that I am projecting the light through this space.

What really prompted me to try this was the possibility of reversing the proposition by which we normally view sculpture.
We normally have some kind of mass or configuration, which
when it is illuminated, we can perceive this is obviously some
kind of an object regardless of its medium.

What I did I think was to reverse this proposition. I introduced incidental matter into the atmosphere and project light through it.
The resulting configuration would be the work of art itself."
Rockne Krebs, 1970

"Rockne really did understand the art of civic celebration,
and was able to do so in an entirely innovative
and movingly beautiful way."
Benjamin Forgey, 2024

Rockne Krebs - 1969 Granted patent for laser beam reflective system; pioneered laser art in the 1960s. Granted patent in seven countries for the first 3-D laser piece, first in the field. Created
the first outdoor laser art, urban-scale laser art, and scanned
laser art with a digital memory. Granted patent for laser [light] beam reflective system.

-HK

Rockne Krebs: Trees

For Rockne Krebs: Trees with music link below

#rkstrees #rocknekrebs #seeintothetrees #justfollowyoureyes
#intothetrees #treestreestrees
Portrait of Rockne Krebs, 1983 © Carol Harrison
​
www.facebook.com/629362525/videos/1129302511691187/

-HK

-HK

Rite de Passage, Rockne Krebs, 1971, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.

-HK

Love and LIGHT in 2024 - 30 years ago on NYE,
The Red River Bridge, Shreveport, LA

-HK

Still Green, Rockne Krebs, 1979, 
The Disneyland Hotel, Anaheim, CA.

Rockne Krebs: A pioneer of laser art and a master of contemporary environmental sculpture

​
2023 ILDA Conference, International Laser Display Association
​
Artistic Seminar

Presentation by Heather Krebs

Rockne Krebs was an ILDA member in the mid-1990s to 2000.

​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"All his art, his light works and his animals,
his sculptures, and his drawings,
​pay homage to the cycles of the natural,
​to energy and time."
​
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

&

The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience
“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge
that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they
are to be thoroughly believable."

Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience

​“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they are to be thoroughly believable.
 
Krebs customarily strikes a heroic stance in his famous city-scale laser structures, whose presence, at least at first, is so spectacular, impersonal, formal, optimistic, rational. There is, however, another side to Krebs’s art, a side that is funny, vulgar, odd, irrational – fully anti-heroic.
 
The second side of Krebs’s artistic character is featured in a small but telling exhibition of his works currently on view at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery. The exhibit even is, in its way, a retrospective view of the work of the 39-year-old artist, rather like an autobiography composed almost entirely of footnotes.

Let it be said, however, that the footnotes are first-rate. The exhibition is extremely interesting to anyone with a prior knowledge of Krebs’ major works for the light that it sheds on them. It also stands quite well on its own. Anyone for whom this show serves as an introduction is sure to emerge wanting to see and know more about the artist and the art.

​THE FOOTNOTE here is a piece from 1943 -- Krebs again, is 39 years old – and it is a neat little thing, a hippopotamus that formed part of a zoo the four-year-old Krebs made for himself. To actually put it into a serious gallery exhibition would be sheer indulgence if the little hippo did not establish a mood of personal, and not altogether happy, reverie that Krebs apparently wanted for this off-beat little show.

​He follows it with a porcelain tiger he made in 1956, the year he graduated from high school; a 1973 sketch on an envelope containing ingenuous ruminations upon the unfortunate fate of whales, and, to bring things up to date in the animal department, an ape drawing he made on Dec. 25, 1977 – Christmas Day and the day after the artist’s birthday.

The ape is a beguiling, touching piece of art, a farcical plastic relief of the kind you can buy in souvenir-novelty shops, transformed by the artist into an expressive personal souvenir with brushstrokes of flecked day-glo paints, a rhinestone tear in the eye, and a tiny 3-D heart cut from Plexiglas.
 
Krebs obviously wasn’t feeling so well last Christmas, and with this piece exposes something of his personal life, touched with irony and humor. Yet the point is not simply anecdotal. 

Krebs the artist as well as Krebs the person identifies strongly with animals, they act for him, as for many artists, as surrogates for something strong and non-rational in his emotional life.

​TO PURSUE THE animal motif one big step farther, we can look at two of Krebs’s original sketches for his large-scale laser-and-prism environment inside the huge steel, concrete, and glass Omni International complex in Atlanta. This is the very type of super-formal, super-“rational” piece that earned Krebs his international reputation. And yet as these drawings show, Krebs’ idea was to make of a configuration of the Canis Major (the Great Dog) constellation upon the vast ceiling of the place.

These sorts of connections help to make clear Krebs’s belief that art and life are inseparable at heart, that art depends in no small measure upon harnessing and transforming the energies of personal experience. Indeed, the principal point of this show may be to enable us to see Krebs’s work whole, to unite in our minds the apparently contradictory poles of his art.
 
Krebs is, to be sure, no animal sculptor, and yet in his own unconventional way he is not far from it. His childhood interest in animals has been extended and given meaning as an important facet in his complex, multi-faceted body of work.
 
So, there are lots of other interesting connections to be made. As a certified visionary Krebs is not at all above tinkering with thoughts of the physically impossible, such as his “One Sun,” a structure to be “made” by cutting geometric holes in clouds so that the sun’s rays form a vast truncated pyramid across the landscape (the sun would then be “rayning,” he puns). Still, in his laser structures, which would have been impossible not much more than a decade ago, has he not found a way in which to make such vast and magical visions come true?

​PERHAPS THE STANDOUT piece in the show is a simple-seeming concoction where a conch shell, painted red-white-and-blue and pointed with 50 rhinestone stars, hangs at the end of a little flagpole that juts from the wall. Inside the conch is a tiny music box, when you wind the shell, it turns and tinkles the first eight bars of “Home on the Range.”​

The piece is very appealing. It manages to be simultaneously simple and complicated, ordinary, and unusual, factual and imaginative, serious and ironic, personal and universal. These are qualities that adhere, in very different ways, to his city-structures, which are commonly appreciated as sheer spectacle or as technological feats, but which actually are much more.
​

​“Home on the Range” is the title Krebs has given to an entire series of these anti-heroic pieces over the past seven years, in the last two (at the New York Customs House last fall and in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1976) he has begun to incorporate them into the structure of his large-scale works. Bringing the two together has not been an easy process, intellectually or formally, but by doing it, by letting the human blemishes show, Krebs has enriched his art immeasurably. This show is a priceless-documentation of the ups and downs the artist has experienced along the way.”

Benjamin Forgey, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978

Rockne Krebs and John Dickson at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery, 1978

John Dickson’s 2019 comment under The Experiment Station, a blog from The Phillips Collection, November 4, 2011, Rockne Krebs, 1938-2011, obituary by Ianthe Gergel.

​Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam’s studio, 1970 
Sam Gilliam in the window of his studio, Rockne’s pickup truck,
​1737 Johnson Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.
Photo by Rockne Krebs, 1970 

“I had the great pleasure to be Rockne and Sam’s studio mate in the mid to late 70s. Furthermore, my studio was the middle floor between them. Rockne was on the large expansive space on the bottom floor, with all the windows covered so it was always setup for the immediacy of his light experiments with lenses, smoke, and lasers. I remember the striking glint of reflected/refracted light that came from the part of the studio where he stored the Pi-Flower series of plexi-resin works. Sam was on the top floor with brilliant light filled walls with hundreds of feet of sopping wet canvas strung through the light-filled space…in various states of drying and recombination. Being in the middle floor meant that I had access to both artists…through their brilliance and the vernacular of each day. It was a great 5-year immersion for me as a young artist, one that has stayed with me throughout my life.” 

​John Dickson, 2019

​Krebsiana: Witty, Offbeat, by Tobie Lanou, What’s Up in Art: The Washington Art Marketletter, February 1978

“Rockne Krebs was a multi-disciplinary artist known for his
monumental laser light installations. His transparent plexiglass
sculptures likewise court symbolic passage through projection
by imaginative means. In addition, notational works on paper
provide glimpses into other levels of expression hinted at in
larger pieces. The mystic vision that Krebs delineated was
spectacular and private, exalted and hermetic, dazzling and still.”

​Mike Zahn, The Technological Sublime, 2022 
Pazo Fine Art

​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"No artist in this city has produced
work more amazing."
​
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

"Rockne Krebs’ exhibit, now at Fraser’s Stable, is quirky, moving, and unfamiliar. It includes neither lines of laser light, glowing planes of Plexiglas, nor slowly marching sunbeams. This exhibition is, instead, Rockne Krebs’ self-portrait.
 
No artist in this city has produced work more amazing. Rockne Krebs has drawn, in the night sky above Arlington, a perfect laser triangle whose closest point dissolved in glinting Oz-green light on the waves of the Potomac. He has sprinkled us with prism-produced rainbows and wrapped us round with fogs. But the Krebs that we know best is not the Krebs that we see here.

​These drawings only hint at his elegant geometries, his dazzling technologies. Confessional, autobiographical, they deal with whales, the debts Krebs owes to others, with his feelings and his politics, his birthdays and his zoo.

The oldest work on view, a hippo made of clay, was done when he
​was 5. He also shows an envelope on which he sketched, one evening, the suffering of whales, their wisdom, and the sea.

Krebs has been a minimalist, an advanced technologist, a conceptualist of sorts, but he is not that only. One melancholy birthday he collages a bleeding ape with sparkling diamond tears.

He did not have it easy. Even when most polished, his art is never slick. He is no pencil prodigy, he struggles when he draws. His work, though often troubled, is at all times honest.
 
In 1965, when a newcomer to Washington, a sculpture that he made was given the first prize at the Corcoran Area Show. A rather academic work, made of painted wood and metal in a constructivist-cubist style, it is here on view.
 ​
The references of this piece to others, to Kenneth Noland and Tony Caro, are no longer of much interest. What makes it intriguing is the way that it predicts what was to come. It hints at orbs and landscape, and its title is prophetic. 

It is called “One Sun.” Krebs had not yet worked with laser beams or sunshine [in 1965], but he was even then, perhaps without quite knowing it, reaching toward pure light.

​And not toward pure light only. His art, as this exhibit demonstrates, has always been inclusive. When he asks us to peer through his transparent planes of Plexiglas, or collages, rivers, streets and cities, to his laser works, he draws into his art as much as it can bear.

​All fine artists show us what they feel must be seen. Krebs is freer with his feelings now than he ever has been, but his motives have not changed. All his art, his light works and his animals, his sculptures, and his drawings, pay homage to the cycles of the natural, to energy and time.”

Paul Richard, Birthdays, Whales and Debts, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978

Rockne Krebs 
b. Kansas City, MO, December 24, 1938 -
​d. Washington, DC, October 10, 2011

-HK, October 10, 2023

Neo-Green, Rockne Krebs, 1987, Memorial Art Gallery -
​University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

​Gallery’s aerial art will have city beaming and Laser show to light up Rochester sky, Jack Garner, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, February 19, 1987 (excerpts).

​“Art will merge with science over Rochester’s skies for six nights in May.
 
A one-of-a-kind laser show linking the Memorial Art Gallery with the University of Rochester and the city is being planned to mark the opening of the gallery’s $6.7 million addition.
 
Lasers will make abstract designs in the air in front of the gallery on University Avenue. In addition, beams of colored light will be directed between the gallery and the UR’s River Campus three miles away/
 
Another laser will be beamed west from the gallery across downtown Rochester and into space.
 
The idea “is to provide a dramatic visual symbol emphasizing the connection between the gallery and the community,” said gallery spokeswoman Deborah Rothman.
 
“We’ll have to issue an advisory for helicopters warning them not to fly too low,” Rothman said. “Otherwise, the laser beams are harmless. They’re too close to the ground for airplanes, and they won’t hurt birds.”
 
The event, titled Neo-Green: A Laser Light Sculpture, is being created by Rockne Krebs, a pioneering laser artist from Washington, D.C., who promises his greatest laser creation for Rochester….

​Three lasers will be placed on buildings at the gallery. Mirrors erected there will be used to make angles and paths of light that will play off the trees and iron gate on the University Avenue side of the museum complex.
 
A fourth laser will be operated from the tower at the library on the UR campus – and will send a beam back to the gallery...
 
The gallery’s new pavilion will connect the old gallery complex with the neighboring Cutler Union building. The pavilion will reorient the museum to a University Avenue entrance and will hold a sculpture garden, a restaurant, a museum store and an exhibition gallery. The first exhibition with the new facility will be a show of 18th century French painting.

---

​Krebs, 48, holds a degree in fine arts from the University of Kansas and has been active in laser art since 1967. In 1968, he showed his first piece of laser art – Sculpture Minus Object  – at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
 
“The laser beam is a modern manifestation of both an antique and basic artist’s tool: line,” Krebs said. “For me, it is both the essence and the spirit of the line. . . A laser is both energy and matter, a line that is continuously generated, traveling statically through space.”
​
​Jack Garner, Gallery’s aerial art will have city beaming and Laser show to light up Rochester sky, 1987

Penny Knowles, Associate Director for Curatorial and Educational Affairs, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, 1987. 

Excerpts from her introduction below.

​“…I think it might be helpful in your full appreciation of him, if I could tell you a little bit more about him and, what I perceive to be, his place in contemporary art.
 
Rockne Krebs is both a pioneer of laser art and a master of contemporary environmental sculpture.
 
He was one of the first artists to recognize the potential of lasers as an art tool, a modern-day counterpart to charcoal, pen or pencil for drawing in space. The first commercial laser was only available in 1960; Rockne experimented with his first indoor pieces in 1967 and since that time –some 20 years—has produced spectacular projects in cities like New Orleans, Philadelphia and his home-base in Washington, DC.
 
But Krebs is not exclusively interested in lasers as he would be the first to tell you. He has also worked with sun-light and star-light using prisms and ‘camera obscura’; Rockne in fact has much in common with other contemporary artists concerned with enhancing our perceptions of the environment through the manipulation of natural and artificial light: I am thinking of artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Charles Ross and Dale Eldred…

​His work, as you have seen it demonstrated in Neo-Green is extremely complex. Like other large-scale environmental artworks such as Christo’s Running Fence, it involves the orchestration of expensive equipment, many workers, paid and volunteer, and the negotiation of special permits…in the case from the FAA, and the City of Rochester.

The Neo-Green Crew

​Despite all the preparations for Neo-Green which have extended over many months, the result is not a sure thing; because it is an artwork existing in real time, and over real-time, it is full of risk. The lasers may malfunction, the atmosphere may not be perfect (and it requires a certain amount of particulate matter to be seen). The lasers and mirrors have to be constantly adjusted, and in fact, as soon as Rockne is through with the lecture, that is exactly what he will be doing.

​Finally, and this is what makes it particularly contemporary:
​the work is ephemeral. It is like a stage performance which after Saturday will exist only in our memory, and in the few preparatory drawings that Rockne has created for it. 

​For most of us, however, the visual traces of those laser beams, delicate and evanescent in the night, weaving their web of magic over the Gallery, linking it visually and symbolically with the downtown and the University, these will be indelibly imprinted in our mind…and we will probably never experience this space without remembering them.

Monumental Drawing for Neo-Green, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY  and Study for Neo-Green, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester  by Rockne Krebs, 1986.
🎼🎶🎵🎼 click for the video on Facebook and on Instagram

And now, finally, I want to introduce you to this hard-working magician, who has certainly done his part in making our reopening such a success. Please welcome…”

Penny Knowles, Associate Director for Curatorial and Educational Affairs, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, 1987. 

Don't make light of art
​Laser Poetry by Ray Czapkowski

Sculpture in the Sky: Rochester will be wrapped in light in ‘Neo-Green’, Jack Garner, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, May 1, 1987 (excerpts).

​Neo-Green, the showcase exhibit for the revamped Memorial Art Gallery, will be displayed for an invitation-only crowd tomorrow night – and on a special, live Channel 21 telecast from 8 to 9 p.m…
 
The laser exhibit will then be available to the public Sunday through Friday nights, from 9 to 11 p.m…
 
The miles-long beams of green-blue light that will connect the gallery with the campus and with downtown won’t be as readily visible from a distance, but are designed in a more philosophical sense to link the Memorial Art Gallery and its parent UR campus to the host community – Rochester.
 
Neo-Green is such a large work that it can’t be totally viewed at one time, from one place.
 
“I particularly enjoy the idea that I can produce something that occupies such a large space,” Krebs said, “but can also be changed quickly and easily, as I see fit.”
 
Krebs explained that the patterns of laser light are created through a maze of three lasers generators and about 20 mirrors on buildings at the gallery and on the campus. A new “work” results when the degree of light or the angles of any of the mirrors are changed.
 
It is the ephemeral, organic quality of laser art that especially appeals to Krebs, who approaches the spontaneity of laser art as a jazz musician embraces improvisation.

​“I started out as a sculptor in which I explored ideas about space. And space is meaningless without light.”
 
At one point, Krebs said, he constructed sculptures of transparent plexiglass. “I walked away from it, turned around, and it seemed to have disappeared. At that moment the idea was triggered to work with lasers. I liked the idea of structuring things in space that aren’t material.”
 
Krebs, 48, who built his first laser installation in 1968, said, “I’ve always said I wanted to build sculptures that people would walk through.”
 
And, in effect, Rochesterians are being invited to walk through Neo-Green.
 
Krebs wants people to feel free to stroll about the gallery grounds, examining Neo-Green from underneath the designs, which will be played off the gallery buildings and the two rows of linden trees in front of the structure.
 
He said he designs his works to be viewed up close – and not from a distance, as one might view fireworks.

​​People also can photograph the work. Ron Baird, a photographic specialist at Eastman Kodak Co., suggests that photographers use 400 speed film, and a wide-open F stop (like F2), with a speed of one-half or one-quarter second. “But the camera must be supported on a tripod, or at least be sitting on your rolled-up coat on a rock or a ledge.”

If other illumination is present – such as streetlights – photographers could try one-fifteenth of a second at F2, Baird added.
 
(Another suggestion is to “bracket,” or shoot at a variety of F-stops and speeds to improve one’s chances of getting a good exposure.)
 
Krebs said the lasers won’t hurt anyone; they’ll be out of reach. The only potential danger is if someone were to look directly down a laser beam toward the source – much like the danger of looking at the sun. But the public won’t be in a position to do that.
 
The laser beam itself is a special form of light that has been amplified by specific molecular action within the projector. The word stands for: “light amplification by stimulated emissions of radiation.”
 
White light from conventional sources diffuses in all directions, a beam of laser light travels in a tight, narrow path. For example, a half-inch beam will expand only to about three inches while traveling one mile.
 
“Lasers are only in their infancy,” said Krebs, “I could see myself working in lasers for the rest of my life.”
 
He added, though, that laser artists have met with their share of naysayers.
 
“Lasers aren’t firmly established in the arts community,” he admits. “But lasers are really only a tool to be used by the artist.”
 
“Fortunately, some of the earliest work in lasers by artists was quite strong, and much of it occurred before lasers became prominent in the entertainment field.”
 
Krebs added that laser art also has had difficulty finding acceptance because it isn’t easily “collectible,” unlike paintings that can be hung on a wall, or marble or metal sculptures that can adorn a patio.
 
In other words, Neo-Green will be here through Friday – and then it’ll disappear into thin air.”

Jack Garner,​ Sculpture in the Sky: Rochester will be wrapped in light in ‘Neo-Green’, 1987

-HK