Aphelion Hall
Fourteen brass rings, one moving sun. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Atelier of light & orbit — Los Angeles
Where light learns to linger.
We build luminous installations, optical instruments and slow cinema for people who still look up.
Selected work2019 — 2026
( 01 )The studio
We don’t decorate rooms. We orbit them — bending photons into slow, deliberate weather. Every piece begins with one question: what would this place feel like at the sun’s closest approach?
Founded in a converted Hawthorne hangar, Perihelion is a studio of eleven — physicists, glassblowers, composers and architects — sharing a single obsession: the quality of a shadow at 5:42 in the evening.
Read our method( 02 )Selected work
Five ways to hold a sunrise
Spectra No. 9
A wall of dichroic glass that changes its mind by the minute.
The Quiet Sun
A rehearsed eclipse for four hundred people and one very patient cellist.
Moiré Garden
Two lattices of light drifting through each other. Kyoto Station Atrium.
Tidal Lanterns
Eight hundred paper lanterns breathing in time with the Pacific.
0
years chasing
the golden hour
0+
installations
across five continents
0
cities that have
seen us at dusk
0M
people who paused,
looked up, stayed
( 03 )Disciplines
What we make
- I
Light sculpture
Permanent and temporary works shaped from glass, brass, mist and laser.
- II
Optical instruments
Handmade lenses, prisms and periscopes — tools for seeing slowly.
- III
Spectral architecture
Façades and atria that rewrite themselves between sunrise and sunset.
- IV
Slow cinema
Durational films scored live, projected onto fog, water and stone.
Observe — phase 01 / 03
( 04 )Method
Observe
We spend a full solar year with a site before drawing a line. Every window, every wall, every minute of weather is logged, mapped and mourned when it changes.
Refract
In our Hawthorne optics lab we grind, fuse and tint the glass ourselves — then bend the day through it until the room begins to behave like an instrument.
Linger
The final act is subtraction. We remove everything that doesn’t earn the silence, and leave behind only the light — and the permission to stay a while.
( 05 )Words
“I walked in to be polite and left two hours later, having forgotten my own phone existed.”
“They don’t light buildings. They give buildings a sense of time — it’s unnerving and perfect.”
“Four hundred strangers stood in silence for eleven minutes. I’ve never seen that happen indoors.”
01 / 03
( 06 )Commissions