Brooklyn artist Jason Krugman is stepping into the public eye. Known for his large-scale, LED-based public art installations, Krugman has displayed work at All Points West Music Festival in New Jersey and Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles, and he recently masterminded one of the largest art installations in the history of Williamsburg’s McCarren Park. “When I first moved to New York City, I was enamored with the Chelsea gallery scene,” he says. “But now I think that public art is the most interesting and fun to make.”
Glancing at Krugman’s studio, it would be easy to assume that the artist has a background in carpentry or engineering. The space is a mix of circuit boards, wires, piles of wood and power tools, all illuminated by the glow of Krugman’s numerous handcrafted LED light fixtures. Surprisingly, Krugman’s previous work focused on drawing and collage, and he originally moved to New York not for art but for Wall St. “I worked in finance for a year and a half, and I totally hated it,” he says. “So I decided to try to find a way to make a living as an artist.”
After graduating with a master’s from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Krugman began assembling a body of work based around kinetic sculptures and responsive-lighting installations. He first gained attention in 2009 for his “Firefly” installations at music festivals, large LED matrixes that ripple with light in the breeze. For his most recent project, “Living Objects,” Krugman collaborated with the North Brooklyn Public Arts Coalition and Brooklyn’s Open Space Alliance to install three enormous, human-shaped sculptures in McCarren Park. Krugman covered the sculptures, two of which are twenty feet high, with hundreds of LED lights. “With ‘Living Objects,’ I wanted to take advantage of the fact that we innately respond to the human form, just like we innately respond to light,” he says.
After raising money for materials and scrambling to finish the sculptures on time, Krugman learned that the project had been canceled due to potential safety ramifications. “It was the most horrible feeling,” he says. “I had the three sculptures in my apartment, and they were taking up the whole place. And I was like, ‘What am I going to do with these? This sucks!’” Luckily, the proposal was reapproved with a few tweaks, and “Living Objects” displayed at the park from December 13 until the end of January. This April “Living Objects” will air in an episode of teen drama Gossip Girl.
Krugman is currently working with artist Christian Cerrito on a series of solar-powered musical instruments for the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia. “We’re hoping they’ll sound like a woodpecker or branches hitting each other, something you would hear naturally in the woods,” he says. In the future, he’d like to experiment with more purely conceptual projects. “I’m most interested in technological society—the idea of us turning into machines little by little,” he says. “It’s amazing how quickly technology is advancing, but it’s also scary, because it calls into question all these things about human nature.”

Related Links:
Jason Krugman : http://www.jasonkrugman.com/