By Bill nevins | photography by kate Russel
I see the light as the truth. If we can truly see it and perceive what it holds, that keeps me inspired in working with light and the holographic medium.
Light breaks through darkness. Hologram artist August Muth says his own major artistic breakthrough came to him in 1994 at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis when he experienced the dark humor of Bruce Nauman’s provocative video installation Clown Torture, a work to which, Muth admits, “my initial response was revulsion.” The multiscreen video piece assaults the viewer with the absurdly repeating actions of a clown performing futile tasks ad nauseam. Muth recalls that on closer examination of the piece, he was captivated by it, even though “most others who entered the gallery left shaking their heads in disgust. At that moment, I realized the power of art to elicit a strong physiological and psychological response.”
Muth has striven to inspire such strong emotional responses with his own art ever since. In his candid, autobiographical 2020 research thesis, “Material Light—In the Realm of the Photon,” he writes that, after viewing Nauman’s disturbing video masterpiece, he “realized that light and the mysteries it holds should be the basis for my creative work.” This epiphany was further shaped by Muth’s awareness that Nauman was the first established artist to work in holography. Over the 40-year course of Muth’s career since then, he has employed that scientifically charged art form in an ongoing quest to grasp the cosmic profundity of light. “Every day I am out looking at sunsets. A friend in France has a huge telescope and we love to explore galaxies millions of light years away,” he offers, by way of example.
His unique hologram creations can be experienced in his Santa Fe studio lobby and in private collections. They also are on display nationally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Corning Museum of Glass, in New York; the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio; and four prestigious galleries: Pie Projects Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles, Gallery Sonja Roesch in Houston, and Modern Fine Art in New York City. His hologram art also has been put on public display at The Paseo Project in Taos, and in an installation in Paso Robles, California.
Muth has a semi-open-door policy at his studio. “Artists who work in the holographic medium visit my studio, from around the world. There is no other facility that incorporates the holographic medium in the way I do. My system facilitates experimentation. I feel a duty to open my studio and techniques to others who have done their homework. My open-studio concept stems from the Greek source of the word hologram. Holo means whole or entirety and gram means drawing or writing. From every point within a hologram you are able to see the entirety of the holographic image. In essence, holograms are an integration of billions of individual perspectives.”
Born in 1955, Muth was raised in a quiet Albuquerque neighborhood. He recalls, “I grew up at the tennis club, in the water every summer day,” and there he began to observe light as a phenomenon. “When I discovered diffraction grating, I was totally happy looking at reflections from swimming pools.” His artistic inclination emerged early; at age 6 or 7 he was selling paintings to neighbors, and his artistic path continued with his construction of water-filled glass prisms illuminated by the light of the setting sun that created spectral colors projected onto his family’s garage door. When he was 18, he moved in with his brother, who was a jeweler, and started making jewelry. “I was intrigued by the light seen in opals and diamonds,” he recalls, and traces his obsession with light to these initial experiences.
After time spent in Aspen, Colorado, Muth returned to Albuquerque and enrolled in the University of New Mexico to study physics, astronomy, and art. He went on to the University of Houston and University of Texas at Austin.
In 1978, he moved to New York City, where he began to devote his full attention to art. There, he continued his jewelry crafting with diamonds and opals, selling his work through several New York fine jewelry galleries. He also began studying holography under the guidance of Fred Unterseher at the Museum of Holography. In 1985, Muth moved to the Telluride, Colorado, area, where he built his first holographic studio and spent seven years mastering the single-beam holographic techniques developed by the late, acclaimed Russian physicist Yuri Denisyuk. There, his
Resplendent Bloom (2023), holographic etching, Particle (2024), holographic image, Ingress (2022), holographic etching
work evolved into the making of small sculptural pieces, and then into creating holograms of these sculptures. In 1985, he also launched a company called Lasart Ltd. to produce these works, and it eventually grew to include two manufacturing sites and employed 12 people with sales worldwide. In 1995, he closed Lasart to devote himself to his true calling, an exploration of holographic techniques and the wonder of light. In 1994, he constructed his reimagined studio in Santa Fe, where he has continued his artistic production of larger holograms to the present day.
Trend visited The Light Foundry, Muth’s workshop/laboratory/studio, in late October for a look into the intertwined mysteries of light and time manifested in his body of work. He first explained that holography originated with sonar and the study of sound waves, which led eventually to identification of the vastly more complex light waves that constitute holograms. He then gave Trend a guided tour of his workspace and a fascinating, detailed demonstration of his process of hologram creation. He first coats a sheet of glass with a very special light sensitive emulsion he makes himself, and then exposes it to an expanded laser beam. This produces a “nano-terrain” of emulsion on the glass surface—the image. These exposures are made on a 14,000-pound table that floats on small inner tubes to prevent any vibrations from disrupting the coherent laser light exposure. If anything moves as little as one ten billionth of an inch during the exposure, the hologram goes “out of phase,” resulting in a blank image.
He demonstrated how he uses lasers, directing their light energy via mirrors toward the emulsions. “Lasers don’t focus,” he notes, “their light is coherent and collimated, their waves lined up in perfect order. Light is a faithful archivist of time,” he states, “and each hologram is an archive of time. When you observe a hologram, you are looking at the pattern of laser light when the hologram was made, and you are also looking at it in the present. So, in that sense, you are looking at time. People see holograms as illusions, but they are not—they are actually recordings of space and time. It is just like a star, which emits light information traveling from far within the universe and from a distant time. We see the star as it was in ancient time, and we also see it in the present.”
But the heart of his art lies not with the process but the results. “I love working with color,” he notes. “And, the colors that I can get out of my emulsions are unique. There are blues—electric blue—which you cannot realize with paint pigments, only in holograms” and other unique tones as well.” He adds, “Living in New Mexico is good because of its wonderful natural light, low humidity, and almost daily spectacular sunsets.”
The artist often laminates three holograms together to produce even more intriguing forms. “When you flip a hologram vertically, the image it holds is flipped inside out and in reverse. So, in theory you are looking at recorded time turned inside out and in reverse. The image now appears to be floating in thin air, enabling you to ‘walk’ into it visually. This effect is called ‘pseudoscopic.’ It calls you to tactically interact with it.”
Despite the astounding qualities of his holograms, he notes, “My work is not always understood in the art world. Some people think it is a gimmick. It takes a while for people to really see what I am doing: the wow factor of dimensional light in space, and the more subtle shifting color. I am creating real multidimensional light forms in free space. It is not an illusion or a trick.”
Asked what is new for him and his art, Muth responds, “What’s new for me is really understanding who light is,” speaking of it as a living entity. “Light and information are always coming to us from the sun and the universe. We need to understand this information as deeply as we can if we are to survive.” He adds his hope that holograms and a deep appreciation of light may help advance human awareness in a truly holistic fashion.
From the Summer 2025 issue
