Jaime McConnell’s website bears her motto: “Life is Supposed to Be Fun.” When you look at McConnell’s art, you can tell, for her, life is fun.
So are the pieces she creates. Her light sculptures are a mix of vintage and space age. Solvang-based McConnell uses antique aircraft and aerospace engineering references in her work.
Her art is inspired by her time living in the Puna rainforest of Hawaii, where she used found objects to create art, fusing together her interest in created environments, her technical skills in metal and woodworking, and her passion for color.
While her hands assemble the finished pieces, the seeds of her body of work came to her in a dream.
“I remember waking up and drawing a few spaceships and other-world type sculptures,” she said. “This was like no other dream I had had before. I could see the entire installation complete with hanging planets, spaceships, and several sculptures, all lit with colored lighting.”
Anxious to get started, McConnell ran into an obstacle at the start. Short on cash and lacking supplies to create her inspired work, she didn’t know how to move forward. Then, inspiration hit again. She gathered old electronic parts and anything else she thought she could turn into a sculpture. From then on, her eyes were attuned to finding stuff and discovering ways to turn it into lighting sculptures.
“Finding new objects for my pieces is just fun,” she said. “I love the fact that I get to reuse items that in some cases would just be going to the landfill.”
Her latest work will be on display at C Gallery in Los Alamos as part of “Light and Dark. Color and Poetry,” alongside the transformative paintings of Dominique Miller. Owner Connie Rohde said she was thrilled to include McConnell’s work in the show.
“When I looked at her work, I thought, ‘Wow, this is far out. This is, like, space age.’ Then I started looking at it more and I thought ‘I really like these,’” Rohde said.
McConnell’s pieces come together in different ways. Sometimes she looks at the various parts she’s collected and a sculpture seems obvious. Other times, she just stares at the pieces spread out on the floor, considering them for a long time until eventually something comes to her.
Most of the pieces use a combination of glass, plastic, metal, or wood. McConnell said getting those pieces to work together is a difficult task, but getting them to come apart again is even harder. So all the sculptures are engineered so the bulbs can be replaced. In other words, they don’t just look good, they actually serve a purpose.
McConnell traces her passion for ambient lighting to her childhood. She said she remembered seeing antique nightlights when she was young and feeling an attraction to them. She relates to her current pieces just as strongly, and the sentiment shows through in her work.
“She just has an excitement about what she does,” Rohde said. “She told me, ‘Since we’re hanging the show, why don’t you take this one home?’ And it was smart, because I couldn’t stop turning it on and off.”
Rohde said McConnell will bring pieces with an array of prices so regular people—not just collectors—will be able to connect with the pieces.
McConnell said her biggest accomplishment as an artist is finding inner peace. She spent three years working on herself and searching for something that would stimulate her mind, while bringing joy and peace and shedding a little light on her life. Now she’s shining light into others’ lives, too.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone’s inner peace regularly gets shattered by a house full of kids. She’ll be stealing some quiet time at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 5-12, 2010.