NYC’s CORE: Club Hosts Audi Art Installation

Last week, New York’s uber-exclusive CORE: Club hosted an exhibit that celebrates Audi’s newest model, the Q7, as part of its Bold Notion Series. Matthew Schreiber, known for his light-centric, eye-catching, mind-bending installations, used 400 LED lights throughout the club, a nod to Audi’s early innovations in LED technology. We chatted with Schreiber to shed some light (pun intended) on the partnership. 

Tell us about the exhibit!
Well, this is my first lobby art, so that was very difficult. I had to figure out how to deal with the space, and all these weird shapes. So I tried to figure out how to erase the space. And one way to do that is to turn all the lights out, so that’s why it’s so dark. For the entrance, I was thinking about the movies where you see people come in through security systems and they’re being scanned, so it’s sort of an abstraction of that, or an overblown version of a laser-scanning entrance, along with some other stuff I think about with physics. And then you move into the next piece, which is a standard of mine—it’s these circles, which happen to work pretty well with the Audi stuff. I made it red to be the Audi color. But I tried to look back to the ’60s pop art movement, so it has this pattern that I’ve never done before. It was hard because there were all these people walking through. The back room is more my standard thing with the lasers and the fog and all that.

How many lasers?
Four hundred throughout all of it. The front part with the hallway is 200, and there’s another 200 in another room…that’s the tripout room. The other stuff is G-rated. As you move through the room it completely changes form. It depends where you stand, and the angle. This piece is based on the shape of the room, which is like a coffin.

How was it collaborating with Audi?
They treated me really special and I got to drive the car. My family and I drove to West Virginia in the Q7 through these little weird towns. Deep into West Virginia. We sat and had breakfast with a real coal miner. We were driving around coal mines with this car—it was like being an alien. I got a ticket driving there, but I was so lucky because I was driving a lot faster before. I was going for it. That car is awesome. If someone had been videotaping me driving…it was spring, you could see the Shenandoah Valley and the winding hills.

Did you learn anything from this project?
I learned how to work in a lobby [laughs], and I’ve never worked on anything corporate before. It’s all museums and galleries, so this is my first full-on corporate kind of thing.

Photography: Brian Ach