Bentley Meeker Illuminates a New Way of Seeing at Carlton Fine Arts
Most people don’t think twice about the light around them. We flip a switch, we see what we need to see, and we move on. But for Bentley Meeker, light is not just illumination — it’s nourishment, emotion, and spirit. His upcoming solo exhibition, Veluminosity, opening November 5 at Carlton Fine Arts on Madison Avenue, is an invitation to look — and feel — differently.
The show features a series of wall sculptures that pit two color temperatures against each other: 3,200-degree Kelvin “film white” and 5,600-degree Kelvin “daylight white.” The contrast, Meeker explains, becomes a meditation on how different kinds of light shape our physical and emotional experiences. “It’s an exploration into what different color temperatures and different light do when they’re next to each other,” he says. “You have a very different perspective than when you see one at a time.”
For Meeker, this isn’t just an aesthetic exercise — it’s a philosophical one. For more than a decade, he’s been probing how light affects us on levels most of us never consider. “We utilize light in a very perfunctory way,” he says. “Our relationship to light is brightness — how many lumens, how efficient, how long the bulb lasts. But we don’t have any meaningful understanding of what light does to us, for us, or with us.”
He compares it to our relationship with food: “If you had the same relationship to food that you have with light, you’d be eating flavored cardboard,” he says, half laughing, half admonishing. “Light has a nourishing component — physically, spiritually, emotionally. Every religion on Earth has some kind of relationship to light. It’s part of who we are.”
That reverence for illumination has defined Meeker’s career. His work has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Southampton Center for the Arts, the National Arts Club, and the CORE Club. He’s lit monumental public works like The H in Harlem and the temples at Burning Man in 2011, 2013, and 2015. Through his company, Bentley Meeker Lighting & Staging, he’s designed experiences for an A-list roster that includes Paul McCartney, Beyoncé, Prince, Rihanna, Madonna, and Karl Lagerfeld. In 2011, he even created a bespoke light sculpture for Michelle Obama’s Nordic States State Dinner at the White House.
But despite his glamorous resume, Meeker’s curiosity about light began far from the red carpet. “I started making art with light at Burning Man,” he recalls. “In 2011, they gave me the privilege of lighting the temple. Everything else at the festival was LED, but I used halogen — real incandescent light. And I got to see how 70,000 people reacted.”
The reaction was visceral. “More people went to that temple at night than ever before,” he says. “Everyone I spoke to told me they were drawn to it inexorably. They didn’t know why — they just had to go. It was like insects to a flame.” That moment, he says, proved something essential: light can alter consciousness.
Today, Veluminosity continues that inquiry — not with pyrotechnics or spectacle, but with quiet intensity. The sculptures are self-contained worlds of radiance and shadow, tension and harmony. “I wanted to make a bunch of sculptures that were beautiful to look at,” Meeker says, “and that really created a sense of curiosity about what light is and what our relationship to it is.”
His interest goes beyond how light looks — it’s about how it feels. “The light we’re in today is not the light humanity evolved in,” he explains. “From the beginning of time until after World War II, light came from something burning. Then came fluorescents, then LEDs. For most people, the only light they experience now isn’t from fire — and that changes the spectral qualities, the visceral qualities. You can feel it. That’s why after eight hours under fluorescent light, you feel awful — but in a skylit office, you feel great.”
In his own home, Meeker avoids LEDs almost entirely. “Except for the hallways and the garage,” he admits. “You’re only in those spaces for a few minutes, so it’s fine. But if you’re sitting in your bedroom reading for hours, it’s nice to have incandescent light. You feel different.”
That intuitive connection to light, he says, is what Veluminosity is really about. “If I can’t figure out the answers, I can at least figure out the questions,” he says. “That’s what my work is — an exploration into the right questions around light.”
Meeker hopes the show encourages visitors to start asking those same questions. “I don’t expect to solve all of humanity’s problems around light,” he says with a smile. “But I’d love to heighten people’s awareness and their relationship to it. If people walk away thinking, Hey, there’s a world of light we could be exploring better, then I’ve done my job.”
For Gallery Director Charles Saffati and associate Claude Pardo, who will host the opening reception November 5 from 6 to 8 p.m., Veluminosity marks an evolution in Carlton Fine Arts’ ongoing exploration of modern sensory art. For Meeker, it’s a chance to remind us that illumination is far more than function — it’s a form of connection.
“Light is what lets us see,” he says. “But it’s also what lets us feel. If I can make people feel something through light — if I can make them curious — then I’m putting up a great show.”