Lighting – The Masks Humans Cannot Hide Behind – An Exploration Into Bringing Art to Life
By Andrew Boerschig, Guarantee Electrical Company – Facility Solutions Project Manager
As an electrical contractor working in the lighting industry, Guarantee Electrical’s work tends to focus primarily on function over form (versus the latter) on a regular basis for our clients. However, we are able to provide additional capabilities that most of the market is unaware of, and which can often be challenging to highlight, so that’s what I wanted to explore in this article.
Our Facility Solutions team at Guarantee Electrical is truly a boutique unit, focused on providing our direct end-user clients with energy-efficient solutions for their facilities with the goal of becoming their single source for any of their electrical or lighting needs. My main focus on the team is providing energy-efficient lighting and controls to our clients, which is my true passion in my career.
As an experienced professional with more than 12 years of lighting experience, I am always looking for opportunities to learn, explore, grow, and experiment with lighting in various forms to gain new perspectives and ideas that I can bring back and share with not only our team, but also with our clients.
This LED retrofit of an art studio in St. Louis grew organically from that single goal in mind — to highlight a unique capability of our team that most may not even realize we can successfully execute.
I was lucky to partner with a local St. Louis artist, Kenneth R. Kuellmer, who has more than 20 years of experience in his field. Since graduating with honors in Applied Science and Technical Graphics, he has specialized in bronze monuments, 3D modeling, animation, product design, portraits, photography, and various multimedia sculptures. He told me that he has been “artistic” his entire life and chose to follow that path for his career. His goal in his own art, and the art he collects, is to “always leave people thinking,” which I thought was an amazing point of view and something that I strive for in my work.
While taking a tour of his studio recently, the first thing I noticed – as a self-professed lighting nerd – was the outdated legacy lighting he was using to illuminate the art in his studio. So, like most new projects we start, our process started with a simple question: “What do you think of working together to re-lamp your studio with new energy-efficient LED lighting as an experimental project and see what we can accomplish?”
He was excited about the opportunity and noted how the correct illumination of art can make a huge impact on those viewing the pieces. This was even before I fully noticed and took in the vast eclectic collection and mix of art within his studio, which was very stimulating and awe-inspiring as I had never seen a unique collection like that in my entire life!
At this point we were off and running to get this project completed together, on our own time during off hours from work and our families. My first goal was to find a manufacturer partner who would support us with this project. I used my vast network within the industry to personally connect with Danny Maney and Michael Cortese at Sylvania LEDVANCE.
I reviewed the project with Danny and Michael and gave them an idea of the products we would need. They agreed to help us in any way they could, which made this project move extremely smoothly from that point on.
In order to capture the true impact of the LED lighting technology, I took a batch of “before” photos of the studio so that we had a baseline of what was currently existing with the legacy lamps. As you can see from the “before” photos, there was indeed some room for improvement! For example, there were numerous “dark” areas, extreme levels of heat from the existing halogen lamps, non-uniform CCT color temperatures, and an overall dull feeling within the space.
We were able to utilize all the existing fixtures currently on-site in order to keep everything simple and just retrofitted them with new LED lamps provided by Danny and Michael at Sylvania LEDVANCE. Sometimes the “best” solutions in lighting are the simplest, which is one of my guiding principles on every project I execute. There’s no need to overcomplicate things when most often the simplest solution will provide the client with the best possible results.
We experimented with CCT light color temperatures, beam angles/optics, light/dark space, and shadows in order to bring the art in the studio to life. Specifically, we used a mixture of CCT color temperatures and optics in order to bring depth to the space. We didn’t want to create a “cool” or “sterile” environment, but rather to mix it up to see if we could bring in some warmth and highlights. To accomplish this, we used a mixture of 2200K, 2700K, and 3000K CCT color temperatures, along with 15Spot & 25
Narrow Flood beam spread optics to have multiple options.
Following our installation of the LED lamps, I took another batch of “after” photos to see the final results. Wow, what an amazing difference we were able to create together in the studio! As you can see, we truly made a significant impact and improvement to the space.
Specifically, what immediately jumped out to us was the light and dark spaces we were able to create, along with additional shadowing on the walls. These aspects truly changed not only the look of the art, but the feeling while viewing it. We were able to create additional depth for the art while highlighting the intricate nature of the pieces themselves. We were also able to increase the overall light levels by four times — all while working to keep everything as uniform and comfortable as possible. Using LED technology ensures that there are no concerns with any harmful UV lighting that could possibly denigrate or damage the art over time. On top of these improvements, we were able to save approximately 80%+ on the energy consumption of the lighting by switching over to LED lighting technology, leading to true impactful utility cost savings month over month and year over year for the customer.
Overall, this “experimental” project couldn’t have been any more successful for everyone involved. We were able to gain new perspectives, ideas, and techniques to utilize moving forward, all while making a truly lasting visual impact.
The next time that you are thinking about the role of the electrical contractor, know that our capabilities are ever far-reaching and consistently growing on a regular basis. There is nothing that our team of professionals cannot create to meet our clients ’specific goals with proper energy-efficient lighting solutions.
Readers can email the author at Andrew.Boerschig@GECO.com or call 618-880-0591.
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