Starlight, Star Bright

Hello, darkness, my old friend.

So many people these days greet the holiday season with a groan and an exasperated eyeroll. Why? Because it’s over-commercialized, crass, garish, loud, expensive, and exhausting.

There’s no denying that the approach of the December holidays can feel that way, but there’s a reason. There’s also an antidote: it’s called “Enchanted Forest of Light,” an interactive evening experience for the entire family, happening now at Descanso Gardens through January 5, 2025. 

In cosmic terms, although we complain that October is too early to kick off the season, it really isn’t. The period between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice has been considered sacred, holy, liminal, choose your own adjective, by human beings of every era, culture and latitude. The trouble with the way we do it today is that our world is too well-lit, and we’re impatient. Our manic culture abbreviates the balancing passage from shortening days to a full stop on December 21, dead-ending the progression. So, instead of a luxurious stretch of earlier nightfall and longer starlight, we panic at changes that should feel soothing.

No wonder we hate the typical shopping center experience that’s been in play since Halloween or so: Santa booming over the sound system, canned choirs screeching shrill crescendos that make us long for sound-stopping earplugs, clashing red-and-green palettes where our eyes secretly long for the velvety and subtle spectrum of twilight, mountains of sweets and snacks when, seasonally, we’re in need of the cleansing contemplation of an empty cup. It’s all just way too much, way too soon, with no time to savor the accomplishment of the harvest, the lordly rising of Orion’s belt, the turning and closing of the soil, the releasing of the completed year, and the deep, centering restoration of winter.

Quiet and darkness need to precede the ruckus and rumpus of celebration for proper context. The tradition of Advent affords such an opportunity, but modern culture being what it is, we won’t wait. The irony, as with so much of human progress, is that the artificial lighting which largely defines our modern world is in fact a form of dangerous pollution, according to Dark Sky International.

While our ancestors even recently fumbled in darkness and near-darkness for half of their lives, for generations, we have had access to lighting at the flick of a switch. While convenient, everyone from owl-whisperers to neurologists now seems to think that this around-the-clock generated light isn’t such a good thing. 

In terms of human health, many reputable studies correlate artificial lighting after dusk with insomnia, depression, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, as well as possible links to Alzheimer’s and other disorders. Granted, while our antecedents huddled around the hearth and the campfire as protection against all manner of things that go bump in the night, as moderns, we are discovering that we need to rediscover darkness to truly thrive.

The threshold space to which Channukah and Christmas both belong is all about honoring the advancing dark—shorter days, longer nights– and keeping the home fires burning with the faith that light and warmth will once again return. Both holidays celebrate the vanquishing of darkness with the igniting of oil lamps or candles, or the shimmer of a long-awaited, beckoning star. The catch is: you need to be in pure darkness to appreciate these luminous victories.

Enchanted Forest of Light

The magic of Descanso’s “Enchanted Forest of Light” lies mostly in the rare treat of allowing us to calmly night-walk undisturbed among visions, enjoying a level of darkness nearly lost to contemporary city-dwellers. Perhaps on some deeply entwined neurological level, the experience triggers genetic memories: seeing full moonrise without the distraction of any artificial light, and the discovery of foxfire or the glow of Luciferase on old trees, and the throb of bioluminescence, plankton, squid, and fish in the eternal sea-waves.

The exhibition is divided into ten installations: Flower Power, Starlight Garden, Pixel Grove, Mulberry Pond, Symphony of Oaks, Fantasy Forest, Luminous Lawn, Ancient Forest, Spectral Sanctuary and Garden of Good Fortune. Curated music swells and fades over the glowing displays, which range from stylized seating that morphs in color projection from white to raspberry-pink, to a settlement of stained-glass cottages by sculptor Tom Fruin, some bearing imprints of mysterious graphics, including playing-cards and the insignia of Dutch Masters cigars, to disco-licious laserium fare. The music modalities change with each setting, seeming to follow after the wandering attendees like a familiar spirit.

We caught up with Yelena Filipchuk, who’s half of the Los Angeles-based collaborative installation art collective known as HYBYCOZO. Together with Serge Beaulieu, HYBYCOZO created the installation called “Celestial Shadows,” part of the area designated as the “Starlight Garden.”

Filipchuk says, “Ultimately, our goal is to create spaces that inspire connection and foster a sense of awe and curiosity among people. Our work consists of larger-than-life sculptures that celebrate the inherent beauty of geometric form and pattern and compose them in ways that harmonize the experience of sculpture, light and shadow. Much of our work draws on inspirations from mathematics, science, and patterns in nature and acknowledges diverse cultural influences in patternmaking and design.”

To approach “Celestial Shadows” is to enter a mystery. Glowing lanterns cast dancing shadows across the sandy terrain, reminding us that the desert has always been a place of challenge, reckoning, temptation. 

The lanterns themselves, often diamond-shaped, appear to have just arrived from a far-off, intelligent galaxy.  As light pulses through their interiors in shades of brilliant magenta and purple, they seem to be observing us and processing information. Pierced geometric patterns suggest coded language, perhaps the key to an unearthly codex or secret maps of the unseen world.

Students of the Kabbalah may see these lighted entities as emanations of Sefirot, especially reminiscent of the Lurian interpretation of the Serifot or “Tree of Life” as a constellation of ten complex and dynamically interacting entities that are often likened to rays of solar energy streaming from a central solar star. A slightly different tilt of the cultural lens aligns these sculptures with the sharply complex, precisely interlocking fields of triangles and diagonals that animate the walls and floors of places holy to Islam, as well as the mandala-like tracery of a rose window in a Gothic cathedral.

Many of these ancient charts bear an uncanny resemblance to diagrams of cells, molecules, atoms and the charting of neural pathways.

Wafting over the shimmering play of light is dreamy, gamelan-style “hand-pan” music, familiar to some as the chime-like steel-drum music of Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.

Filpchuk says, “We chose hand-pan music for the installation and then programmed the custom lighting to the music. Hand-pans produce rich, resonant tones that are relaxing and atmospheric. The frequency ratio of the hand-pan is designed to have a calming effect on the brain.”

Of the installation, Filipchuk explains that many of the pieces on view were made by HYBYCOZO specifically for Descanso Gardens.

“’Celestial Shadows’ is made up of rings of large-scale polyhedrals, laser-cut with geometric patterns that cast shadows on the surrounding environment. The movement of light and shadow is a central element in our artistic vocabulary. We harness the power of light to transform the physical space, illuminating hidden dimensions and infusing them with a sense of enchantment. These patterns serve as conduits for deeper exploration, provoking introspection and contemplation to uncover the underlying symbols embedded within the human psyche.”

Although the installations are numbered, Descanso wisely does not map out any specified route for visitors. In the unfamiliar chill and darkness, we meandered from the mystical desert encounter created by HYBYCOZO to the gently undulating raked patterns of the Zen garden, where the rhythm and pattern match was uncanny.

Fields of tiny “firefly” bulbs flash in sequence, and the famous tulip beds of Descanso, now at rest as the slumbering underground bulbs prepare for another spring, ripple with wave after wave of ecstatic neon purple, pink, electric blue. It’s a quiet holiday experience compared with all others. Nobody spritzes you with perfume or corners you with a toothpick bearing a Cinnabon sample. There are no screaming snowmen or gesticulating gnomes, no madhouse bells, and no fake snow, the night-path reminding us instead of winter’s pristine gifts of distance, space, and silence.

DEETS

• Enchanted Forest of Light, now through January 5
• Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge, 91011
• 818-949-4200
• Now open through January 5; Closed December 24 -December 25
• Tickets must be purchased in advance