Likeness of an Allegory is a site-specific art installation commissioned for the City of Minneapolis Permanent Collection. Located in the new Minneapolis Public Services Building (2021), LUCITO’s intervention responds to the City’s call for “luminous ceilings” by working with light and its complete absence: a sculptural mass finished in ultra-matte black pigment hovers ominously below an evenly lit ambient field of light.

Due to its unique finish, the hovering mass is devoid of surface features, rendering it in silhouette and visible to the human eye only at its edges against the light field above.

While operating at this binary interface between light and dark, LUCITO’s work takes inspiration and cues from Ambrogio Loronzetti’s 14th Century frescoes, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government.  

In LUCITO’s Likeness of an Allegory, a game of perceptual hide-and-seek plays out as strategically sculpted characteristics and symbolic features of Minneapolis’ past and present reveal themselves to observant passersby in the lobby below.

worm’s-eye plan diagram
overall / absolute perimeter / bottom profile / top profile / viewshed

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