SUBSTANCIAL (phase 4)
Location: Sun River Health | New York, NY, 2007
9 2/3 ft x 17 1/2 ft x 16 2/3 ft (2.95 m x 5.33 m x 5.08 m)
Acrylic, convex lens, LEDs, custom lighting sequence, and electrical hardware.
SUBSTANCIAL PHASE 4 is a 9 x 17-foot light sculpture expanding the original SUBSTANCIAL commission across the facade of the Hudson River Community Health Center in Peekskill, its dense accumulation of glowing lanterns embodying the explosive growth of a grassroots health initiative from a single flagship location into a network of fourteen community centers across New York State.
- Building directly on the community response to the earlier phases of SUBSTANCIAL, Phase 4 allowed Amorós to deepen the work’s original conceptual framework, translating the Health Center’s evolution from a single Peekskill facility founded in 1975 into a fourteen-site network across New York State into a single luminous architectural gesture.
- The dense accumulation of lanterns along the facade length was chosen by Amorós to embody the relationship between potentiality and movement, with each lantern representing both an individual community served and the collective expanding mass of an organization built entirely through grassroots determination.
- SUBSTANCIAL PHASE 4 positions light as a direct metaphor for the Health Center’s own mission, with illumination functioning simultaneously as aesthetic experience, community beacon, and a visible declaration of the organization’s reach and presence within the neighborhoods it serves.
- Taken together, SUBSTANCIAL and SUBSTANCIAL PHASE 4 represent one of the most sustained and community-rooted public art commissions of Amorós’s early career, affirming her practice’s consistent commitment to honoring the women and communities whose labor builds institutions that outlast any single generation.
Hudson River Community Health Center, The Peekskill. With the community’s support of the first phases of Substancial, the opportunity emerged to explore the initial concept and intentions of the piece in further detail. Substancial Phase 4 reflects the origins of the Hudson River HealthCare Center as a grassroots project. This ties into the later emergence of the concept of the health center as a network of service providers, which originates from the flagship Health Center in Peekskill, New York. Since the Health Center’s inception in 1975, 14 additional facilities have been created in different counties throughout New York State. Substancial Phase 4 incorporates the idea of the relationship between potentiality and movement, with it’s dense accumulation of lanterns, which convey a sense of potential energy and expanding mass, all in an explosion of light and form along the length of the façade of the health center.
Hudson River HealthCare is a network of fourteen community health centers located in Peekskill, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Amenia, Dover Plains, Pine Plains, New Paltz, Goshen, Haverstraw, Greenport, Walden and Monticello.