Ephemera · Daniel Popper

Western Lights is Reno's first illuminated art festival — three city plazas across six downtown blocks, transformed into an outdoor gallery for three nights. Daniel Popper was in the inaugural lineup; his Ephemera anchored one of the central plazas.

Our brief was the surface of the work itself. Treat the sculpture as canvas. Compose a baroque scrollwork vocabulary — vibrant ornament that flows across the robe, antlers, and crown — that reads at a distance and rewards a closer look.

Then it snowed. An unforecast storm hit Reno the night before the opening. Within hours, the sculpture was no longer the white fiberglass we had calibrated against — she was a snow-covered figure. The original palette, composed for clean reflective surface, would have read flat against the new white-on-white.

We re-mapped overnight. The new palette swapped warm tones for cool — deep blues, silver scrollwork, baroque ornament tuned to the temperature of snow. Pattern density rose, so the projected ornament could compete with the texture the snowstorm had added. The flower-crown highlights stayed warm to compensate for the ambient drop.

The result was a piece that felt like it had always been winter. The work held attention — and Daniel Popper's full creative trust — across all three nights.