In Levine Time

Working at the intersection of light, perception, and stillness, Chris Levine has built a practice that stretches far beyond the edges of the traditional canvas. His work unfolds in immersive environments where lasers cut through space and light behaves less like illumination and more like a living presence, accompanied by meditative sound frequencies that seem to slow time itself.

In conversation, he traces the path that led him here—toward a language of light, silence, and expanded awareness—yet he reminds us how crucial it is to encounter the artwork in person, because perception, scale, and sensation refuse to sit still on a screen, and even less so in description.

What pivotal personal or professional moments in your life led you to fuse visual art with sound frequencies? Would you describe this as an intuitive discovery, or the result of a deliberate exploration of perception?

CL: Before I went to art school, it was music I lived for. It’s what I wanted to do, and art school was just in the meantime. I was a drummer and used to run to my drum kit and thrash the hell out of it—a primal urge. Increasingly, I’m drawn to working with sound—not necessarily music—as a dimension of my work with light taking that to the extreme, my work will be presented over the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, using a repurposed military-specification laser. It will beam a super-powerful, clean sensory signal of light at 515 nm, oscillating at 432 Hz, sending it up into space.

Side note, tests we did last year were spotted by the International Space Station.

Looking at your artistic evolution as a continuous process of transformation, is there a period you consider the most defining or significant for your creative language? What makes this “era” particularly meaningful to you?

CL: For sure, discovering meditation (Vipassana) marked the beginning of a new chapter in my life. In fact, the chapter leading up to it might well have been my last—I wanted out. The drugs didn’t work anymore, I was done.

Now I often say, “Stillness is a portal to the divine,” and I had that written on the wall at Houghton Hall when I did my show, 528Hz Love Frequency. A lot of my inspiration and the clarity of my vision are born out of stillness.

Your works often evoke meditative or transcendent experiences in viewers. Which audience reactions have been the most memorable or unexpected, and have any of these responses influenced the direction of your subsequent creations?

CL: My work is all about the experience. By using the very pure sensory signal of a laser—by definition, a pure tone of light—I’m able to induce a meditative state, albeit briefly, in my audience. In this way, we become more heart-connected and not caught up in the noise of the mind. It’s a place of refuge, and it feels good.

I remember at one installation, I would walk around—no one knew I was the artist—and just listen to how people were reacting among each other. I’ll never forget this kid saying to his mother, “I don’t get it, but I love it!” They didn’t have to approach it through some prescribed narrative or intellectual filter—they just felt it, and that made them love it even more.

Images courtesy of the artist.