Electric Forest: Showcasing more than just music

The last full week of June sees the village of Rothbury, Michigan — population 462, according to the 2020 census — flooded with tens of thousands of people.

Music fans from all over the country flock to this small town for the Electric Forest music festival. Over four days, 40,000 people camp in an open field by day and explore the lights and sounds of the forest by night.

Electric Forest is not simply a music festival, though. From sculptures lurking around every bend, tiny cabins housing painters hard at work right before your eyes and wandering groups of performance artists, it is a celebration of art, in any and all forms.

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Its 60 mirrored faces reflect the surrounding world back onto itself. It’s an impressive structure on its own, but this is just half of what it has to offer. Mirroring the festival goers themselves, it lies dormant until nightfall. It’s then that the sculpture comes to life. The orb is filled with over 10,000 LEDs and dazzles anyone passing by with flurried patterns of multicolored lights. Festival goers take turns lying in the dirt in order to stare up into the orb and be fully immersed in what it has to offer.

One interpretation of the sculpture is that it’s an ode to the importance of self-care. During the day, it struggled to compete with constant sunlight. If it were forced to shine for hours and hours, days on end, it would literally burn out. Much like all of us, the sculpture needs time to rest, recharge and reflect in order to shine its brightest.

Another could be that with its mirrors infinitely expanding the perceivable space surrounding us, it serves as a reminder, in our ever expanding universe, of just how small we are.

Either interpretation is correct, and so is any other meaning someone may feel after viewing the piece. For the artist behind it, there is no right or wrong interpretation.

“A big part of art isn’t the intellectual interpretation of the physical space but the emotional reaction that space creates or conveys,” creator Stephen Rhoades said.

The sculpture, titled the Infinity Temple, was created by Rhoades and his crew lead, Matt Marsie, of the Vermont artist group Florentine Farms. It’s an updated version of a piece that first won its place in the forest in 2019 as part of the Electric Forest’s Plug In Art Installation Sponsorship Program.

Every year, Electric Forest calls upon artists to be inspired by the duality of night and day in the forest and submit proposals to receive funding to bring their dreams to life. For Rhoades and Florentine Farms, the opportunity to have their work on display at Electric Forest changed their lives.

“It just catapulted us into the music festival installation world and just snowballed from there,” he added.

Rhoades studied studio art and business administration at the University of Vermont. It was this combination that he said gave him an edge when breaking into the art industry.

“A lot of contemporary art education kind of relies on these concepts that emerged during the contemporary art movement of the 60s and 80s where you’ll find this angel investor or you’ll be discovered and you’ll become this famous artist … and that’s just not a reality anymore,” Rhoades said.

Instead, he used his business knowledge to become well-versed in grant writing. He stressed there is money out there, specifically for artists, but for every funding opportunity, there will be a mass of artists fighting for it.

“You have to be OK with 10 nos before you get a yes,” he said. “And we still deal with that today. We get a lot of rejections.”

Grant programs offered by music festivals like Electric Forest give artists an opportunity to not only receive financial funding to create their work but also allow them to network with others at the event.

“Networking is incredibly important from the logistical planning aspect of it, you know, that’s what gets us jobs,” Rhoades said. “We do good work. We make good relationships. Those people in the industry tend to work for other festivals. They need art, they reach out to us.”

In addition to opportunities for artists, Electric Forest and other like-minded festivals also offer broader access to art by different communities. But it’s something Rhoades hopes to see this expanded even further.

“I think as we continue to push this kind of normalization of the contemporary counterculture movement, we will see more and more people find their ways into events like this, which will breed a larger accessibility to the masses,” he said. “I do think, however, these events do isolate a large chunk of the older generations that are more ingrained to museum or gallery styles of exhibitions. We are seeing artists like myself find their ways into galleries and museums, which is great, but it’s not about just moving in one direction. It’s about moving in both directions.”

If you’d like to see more work by Stephen Rhoades and Florentine Farms, they will be at the Secret Dreams Music and Arts Festival from Aug. 17-19 in Thornville, Ohio.