The Orlando Sentinel called me a "light artist." I remember reading that and sitting with it for a moment. I'd spent years answering the question "what do you do?" with a string of job titles that never quite fit. AV integrator. Experience designer. Creative director. None of them wrong. None of them complete.
Light artist felt right in a way I hadn't expected. Because that's really what I'm trying to do — not install equipment, not run cable, not program presets. Build something that uses light as its primary language and makes people feel something they didn't feel before they walked in.
Where It Started
I came up through AV integration. Hotels, resorts, corporate spaces — wiring buildings, designing signal paths, commissioning systems that had to work reliably every single day. That technical foundation is everything. You can't build a large-scale art installation if you don't understand power distribution, structural loads, data protocols, and how a 100-pound LED panel behaves when it overheats in a Florida summer.
But somewhere along the way, the jobs that lit me up — the ones I couldn't stop thinking about — were the ones where the technical work became invisible. Where someone walked into a room and their jaw dropped, not because they were impressed by the gear, but because they were genuinely moved by what the gear was creating.
That shift in focus changed everything about how I approach a project.
The Work of a Visual Artist in a Technical World
Being a visual artist who works at the scale of buildings and public spaces means you're constantly translating between two very different worlds. On one side: the emotional, spatial, intuitive process of imagining an experience. On the other: the precise, structural, systems-level work of making it real.
Most people in the AV world are exceptional at the second part. Fewer are comfortable holding both at once.
For me, it starts with a feeling. What do I want someone to feel when they step into this space? Not "impressed" — that's too surface. I'm looking for something more specific. The feeling of being small inside something vast and beautiful. The warmth of light that seems to breathe. The sense that the environment knows you're there and is responding to you, even when it isn't.
Once I can feel that clearly, I work backwards to find the structure that produces it. That's where light physics, material science, spatial design, and AV systems all come together.
What "Large Scale" Actually Means
People use "large-scale art installation" to mean a lot of different things. For me it means something specific: work that's site-specific, structurally significant, and impossible to ignore.
It means a sculpture that occupies the full height of a hotel atrium and shifts the color of the entire lobby as you move through it. It means an immersive room that wraps 360 degrees and makes you forget where the walls are. It means a commissioned light sculpture built for a specific place, a specific client, a specific kind of visitor — not pulled off a catalog page.
The work I'm most proud of is work that couldn't exist anywhere else. The ArtCube was built for a festival environment where people needed an anchor, a meeting point, a landmark. Spectral Wake at the New American Home 2026 was designed around the specific way dichroic material behaves in natural light at the latitude of Las Vegas in January. You can't separate those pieces from their context. That's the point.
Why Orlando?
I get asked this sometimes, usually by people from bigger markets. Why Orlando? Why not New York, LA, Miami?
The honest answer: Orlando might be the best city in the world right now for experiential art. Not because of the art world — the gallery scene here is modest — but because of the sheer density of environments that exist specifically to produce emotion at scale. Theme parks, resort properties, convention facilities, entertainment venues. Every major operator in that ecosystem is looking for ways to differentiate, to create the kind of guest experience that earns a social post, a return visit, a recommendation.
That's not a small market. That's one of the most sophisticated experiential design markets on the planet, right here in Central Florida. And most of the significant operators in it have come through our doors at some point.
"The best art doesn't show you something to look at. It puts you somewhere to exist in."
What Clients Actually Commission
When a developer, hospitality brand, or corporation reaches out about a public art commission, they usually lead with the aesthetic conversation. They want something striking. Something Instagram-worthy. Something that tells a story about who they are.
All of that matters. But the deeper conversation — the one that produces work people actually remember for years — is about emotional function. What role does this piece play in the life of this space? Who's experiencing it, and at what moment in their visit? What feeling should linger after they leave?
When those questions get answered clearly, the aesthetic choices almost make themselves. The materials, the scale, the motion or stillness, the color temperature — it all flows from the feeling you're trying to create.
That's the design process I bring to every commission, whether it's a lobby sculpture for a new resort, an immersive installation for a corporate headquarters, or a permanent public artwork for a city plaza.
The Technical Side Is Still the Foundation
I want to be clear about something: the artistic vision doesn't replace the technical rigor. It requires it.
Dichroic glass behaves differently at different angles of incidence, at different light intensities, across different substrate colors. An LED installation that looks transcendent at night looks flat and mechanical under fluorescent ambient light unless you've accounted for it. A sculptural form that reads beautifully in a rendering can disappear in a large atrium if the scale isn't calibrated to the space.
The 20+ years I've spent in AV integration — designing systems for some of the most demanding hospitality environments in Florida — is what lets me push the creative work further than most. I know what's possible because I've built it. I know what fails because I've fixed it.
That combination — the artist's eye and the engineer's discipline — is what defines the work we do at 42 Audio Visual.
What Comes Next
The pieces I'm most excited about are the ones not yet built. Monumental outdoor installations. Permanent civic artworks. Experiences that earn their place in a city's visual identity, not just its event calendar.
If you're a developer, architect, or brand thinking about what art could do for your space, I'd love to start that conversation. Not with a pitch, just with the questions that tend to unlock the most interesting work.