With the whoosh of a curtain, a new art installation was revealed in downtown Naperville on Tuesday.
“Naperville’s Music Box is an interactive, creative environment that invites residents and visitors to explore and play and create sound and light and movement, really unlike anything that we’ve seen here in town,” said Michael Gold, ArtForum Naperville chair.
A collaboration between ArtForum Naperville and local artists
ArtForum Naperville and Freightwood Creative Production artists Maddie Peterson and Joshua Carr worked together to create the exhibit.
“The Music Box came about after a discussion with ArtForum, and the idea is to create something that’s three-dimensional,” said Carr.
“Something that was interactive that people could really engage with,” Peterson added.
Naperville’s Music Box invites interaction within community
The installation features a piano set up in the breezeway between the Apple and Sephora stores on West Jefferson Avenue. When the keys are played, hot air balloons hanging from the ceiling move and light up with the notes.
“You can either walk through and just marvel at the way it works. You can stop and play the keyboard and watch how everything reacts around you. You can sit back on the bench and kind of meditate and watch others interact with it. It’s really a way for the community to come together, really interact together,” Gold continued.
“It’s great to see people engage with it and be excited about it, seeing people walk in and play on the keyboard and watch everything move around them and take in the space, a space that’s not normally used as anything more than a cut through. Making something out of nothing,” Peterson said.
“Our thing is really about life experience and about the idea that you need to find those bits of joy in your life, and those are the common connections that we all have as humans. So it’s important to have things like this where you realize that we all share the same wants and needs, or a childlike sort of behavior,” Carr said.
Music Box open temporarily through holiday season
The interactive installation will be on display through the end of January.
“Art is supposed to challenge us and delight us in ways that we don’t expect,” Gold said. “The holiday season in general is a time when we tend to put aside a lot of our negativity. We kind of look for beauty and light and lightness. And a visual piece like this really just invites that.”
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