Helmick and Schechter’s sculptural chandelier rises nearly 18 feet on an armature of steel rods and laboratory clamps, holding hundreds of glass beakers, flasks, test tubes, pipettes and other elegant tools of the forensics trade. In addition to genuine lab equipment, the sculptural lighting boasts scores of artist-made images, ranging from fingerprints, molecular models of drugs and DNA strands, to implausible shapes of lab glass, pop cultural references to police work, more than 130 magnifying glasses and Petri dishes displaying backlit images of evidence.
Pattern Recognition describes the mystery-solving work of scientific and criminal investigations. From the side, the sculpture appears to be a chaos of unrelated parts. From directly below, its array of objects, lights and materials form a fully resolved concentric pattern – a symbol of the lab's mission to distill clues into clear patterns of evidence.
The artists worked with the Police Department and Durrant, the building architect, to integrate their work into the design of the building.
