Highlights from the Fall Arts Guide

Leo Villareal: Digital Sculpture

Opens Friday, Nov. 3

Museums this week

Galleries this week

Leo Villareal, an artist who works well within the light-installation tradition captained by Dan Flavin, prefers the bulbs that are forcing Flavin’s fluorescents out of the market. Programmable (and cheaper to replace), light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can be found in just about any public sign that, as few as 10 years ago, would have been powered by fluorescent or neon bulbs. Though Villareal isn’t the most prominent artist working with LEDs—that honor belongs to text-artist Jenny Holzer—his bulbs are easily the most sculptural. It’s a facet of Villareal’s work that’s easy to overlook: His repetitive dials and parallelograms are subdued forms that tend to let the light do the work. The lights, indeed, do a great deal of work—each installation is capable of emitting millions of colors, a quality the artist exploits to mesmerizing effect. Villareal designed the software system that governs the light matrices in his variegated installations, which pulse and fluctuate. The iconic finale to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind isn’t too crass a comparison to the light show Villareal achieves—and, if anything, the artist’s inclusion in the Hirshhorn’s “Visual Music” exhibition last year cements the casual association to music that viewers often draw from his work. Unlike Flavin’s work, Villareal’s lights don’t literally hum, but their lullaby patterns strive for synesthesia. “Leo Villareal: Digital Sculpture” is on view from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday to Saturday, Dec. 16, at Conner Contemporary Art, 1730 Connecticut Ave. NW, 2nd Floor. Free. (202) 588-8750. (Kriston Capps)

	"Appropriately Yours" is on view to Saturday, Oct. 14, at Transformer Gallery
	An exhibition of works by Jae Ko is on view to Saturday, Oct. 28, at Marsha Mateyka Gallery
	"I Call Shotgun" is on view from Saturday, Nov. 4, to Saturday, Dec. 16, at Adamson Gallery