WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS

Artist: Matthew Mazzotta
Client: Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center
Collaborator: Sujin Lim, Stephanie Yeung, Daniel Shieh, Yalun Li

For an artist who has made a career of creating spectacles such as a giant flamingo for an airport's central terminal, a house that physically transforms into an open-air theater and machines that convert dog waste into energy to illuminate public parks, this is Matthew Mazzotta’s quietest work.

Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center (Downey, CA) –The new Restorative Care Village campus is finally open at the world-class award-winning Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center just outside of the Los Angeles City limits. For decades Rancho Los Amigos has ranked among "America's Best Hospitals" and is known as one of the largest comprehensive medical rehabilitation centers in the U.S with several industry-standard medical devices being developed on site such as the halo brace. In 2020, artist Matthew Mazzotta was invited to design an artwork that would activate the public spaces within the Rehab Center and create an aspirational space for residents to socialize.

Mazzotta said “This is the quietest piece I’ve ever created. When I was developing the artwork I interviewed patients who had sustained life-altering injuries and they described wanting a calming space to meet friends and family. The dichroic glass used for the walls and roof continuously changes colors depending on the intensity and position of the sun, casting multicolor shadows throughout the day. The experience of bathing in the colored lights and shadows while inside the barn structure embodies Rancho’s mission for its healing residents: “Movement and Transformation.”

Overview

WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS is a shade structure, in the shape of a barn, made of dichroic glass with an orange fruit weathervane on top. The dichroic glass barn creates a constantly changing image of soft pastel colors and shadows throughout the day that highlights the core themes of Rancho’s mission for its residents who are healing from life-altering traumatic physical injuries: “Movement and Transformation.” Beyond the visual and thematic connections to Rancho’s identity, WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS provides a gathering space for the staff and residents who will live and work on-site. The functional sculpture is as much of a landmark as it is a site for socializing, finding shade, and a location to participate in Restorative Care Village outdoor activities.

Goals

The design of the public sculpture is a balance of the Center’s historical farming identity and its contemporary contributions to the field of rehabilitation medicine over the last 100 years.

The weather vane on top of the structure is in the shape of an orange with a green stem and two leaves and the title, WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS, comes from an article in the Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1902 — “Poor Farm amid Orange Blossoms: “A poor farm in the midst of an orange grove...wrapped in sunbeams and wreathed with flower gardens, the Los Angeles County Poor Farm...transmitting the influence of its buoyancy into human hearts.”

Process

Developed through countless interviews with patients and staff, the artist aimed to make a quiet, reflective, and aspirational piece of art that could “let your mind be at ease for a minute.” WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS is a nod to Rancho’s farming history and its contemporary cutting-edge practices. The iconic physical form stems from the wooden barns on the property from when it was a citrus farm. The gabled ends of this barn are removed and the roof and walls are made of color-transforming dichroic glass. This dichroic glass allows the barn to be a welcoming light-filled destination for residents and their families to meet, and at the same time serve as a dynamic landmark on campus with colors and shadows shifting throughout the day, adding a sense of movement and transformation to the campus.

Additional Information

Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center was founded in 1888 to serve farming families who could not afford medical services. Originally named "The County Poor Farm," proceeds from selling the oranges grown by the farm were used to provide needy families with medicine and services. By 1922, the facility had fully transitioned into a formalized medical facility, although farming operations would continue on the grounds. Currently, Rancho Los Amigos is now ranked among America's best hospitals in rehabilitation medicine and has pioneered numerous medical innovations and patented inventions that have transformed the field. WRAPPED IN SUNBEAMS has brought color, lightness, and healing energy to the lives of those going through extreme physical and mental transformations at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. It is an uplifting space that will be etched in people's hearts and minds while on their path to recovery, full of memories shared with friends and family who visit.

ABOUT MATTHEW

Matthew Mazzotta has worked at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. Matthew Mazzotta’s public projects have received international art and architecture awards such as the Architizer A+ Award, Azure’s AZ Award, The WAN Award, and six of his projects have been recognized by the Americans for the Arts. He has won four of the major international Architecture awards, as well as, “Architecture Project of the Year” by the Dezeen Awards at the Tate Modern in London.

Matthew’s work has been featured on CNN, BBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, Discovery Channel, and Science Magazine to name a few, and presented at the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC.

Matthew Mazzotta received his BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Masters of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. He is a TED Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Grantee, a Smithsonian Artist in Research, as well as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.