Bruce Munro’s Narnian Fantasies Light Up Montalvo Arts Center

The Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga is a romantic place when the sun goes down. A warm South Bay wind blows through the towering trees. The warm burble of laughter and conversation from party goers in the villa floats in the air. Crickets chirping in tandem drown out thoughts of the outside world.

The British artist Bruce Munro picked up on that magic when he was invited to visit this 1912 Mediterranean-style villa and its expansive grounds, once the country home of San Francisco’s mayor at the turn of the last century, James Phelan.

On the side of the house, Munro spotted a stained-glass window featuring a Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s galleon, the San Salvador, plying a boisterous Pacific Ocean. It suggested to Munro instead the C.S. Lewis children’s book: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, fifth in his seven-novel series, The Chronicles of Narnia.

Stories in Light includes “Dawn Treader,” the original inspiration for Bruce Munro’s Narnian exploration at the Montalvo Art Center. He illuminated this 106-year-old stained glass window so as to create the illusion of movement. (Photo: Courtesy of Mark Pickthall)

“I think you should see the world as a child,” Munro says. “In fact, the less I try to overthink things, the more I think they seem to work.”

Two years later, Stories in Light overlays Narnian dreamscapes onto Montalvo’s grounds, though you don’t have to have read the books to appreciate the pretty lights. Munro creates immersive light-scapes, often complimented with sounds, that draw you in to a space in a self-contained fashion.

There’s “Silver Sea,” featuring huge clusters of long-stemmed, pulsing light bulbs; illuminated “lilies” on the grass lawn in front of the villa. It’s a concept Munro has made use of before in UK installations. In Dawn Treader, four characters venture in a small boat through a sea of lilies.

Then they reach a wall of water that reaches into the sky. That’s “Reepicheep’s Wave,” which in Munro’s imagination becomes 18,000 plastic mussel shells, shimmering along translucent cables as a musical soundtrack endlessly rises.

“Stories in Light” includes “Reepicheep’s Wave,” on display in the Garden Theatre at Montalvo Arts Center. This piece features over 15,000 plastic mussel shells suspended on illuminated optical fibers. (Photo: Courtesy of Mark Pickthall)

“I see gardens and spaces as a series of sort of outdoor rooms,” Munro says. “Part of the reason I do what I do,” he says, “is because I love the real experience of the world. I want to encourage people to get back out there and experience life and interact with people and landscape. We’re starting to rely too much on sitting in front of our screens and doing virtual something or other.”

Stories in Light is Munro’s ninth large scale solo exhibition in the US, and his first on the West Coast, comprised of the largest number of Munro’s works ever displayed together. 

Munro is quick to credit his team whenever fans gush in front of him. All of the materials, made by him and that team at his studio in England, were shipped to California, where hundreds of volunteers and Montalvo staff joined Munro’s team members to put everything together.

“Light Shower,” on display in the villa’s Solarium, will stay on permanently at Montalvo Arts Center past the closure of “Stories in Light” in March, 2019. (Photo: Courtesy of Mark Pickthall)

Munro says each piece is designed to work on its own, but the collective experience of wandering through ten of them adds up to delight.

If you plan to go, be aware you have to park at West Valley College and take a shuttle, because there’s no driving on the grounds. Right? That would ruin the magical effect of the lights at night.

Stories in Light runs October 28, 2018 – March 17, 2019 at the Montalvo Arts Center in  Saratoga. For more information, click here.

Copyright 2018 KQED