Following the success of Atlanta Botanical Gardens’ “Garden Lights, Holiday Lights,” Fernbank Museum has created its own festive multi-sensory evening light show.
One big difference: it’s not tied to any holiday and will run through early March. Using the 10-acre woodsy area behind the museum, “Wildwoods: AGLOW” celebrates Atlanta’s native flora and fauna using a blend of lights and projections, specially built structures and a wintry soundtrack.
It’s meant to be whimsically evocative, almost meditative compared to more traditional Christmas light shows around town.
“We wanted to uncover the hidden in nature that is all around us here in this area of Georgia,” said Sarah Arnold, Fernbank’s director of education. “We also wanted to distinguish ourselves from the other experiences.”
Tickets for “AGLOW,” which also allows guests access to the entire museum, are priced $26.95 to $32.95 for nonmembers and $22.95 to $32.95 for members. The show runs from 6-9:30 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays and 6-10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Check the calendar for available dates.
Arnold, who was part of the concept and design team, said it took two years from conception to completion and she is thrilled by the final results. “Even seeing the illustrations over the course of the process,” she said, “the actual experience blows those illustrations away, as beautiful as they were. It’s so much different seeing it live.”
Kevin Hamilton, a 53-year-old financial customer service rep, brought his girlfriend Christina Pierce, 54, who works at Publix. “It feels like I’m in ‘Avatar’!” Pierce said. “It’s really cool! I like the different colors.”
Arnold wants people to feel the connection between living things, whether it’s seeds, trillium flowers, old-growth tulip poplar trees or a highly stylized version of a columbine flower, which blooms upside down and possesses red petals.
The experience features visual representations of native animals such as the chipmunk, the raccoon, the green anole lizard, the frog and the spotted salamander. Some are nocturnal and reclusive, seldom seen by visitors during the day.
There are areas where sensors set off custom music “so there’s a symphony of sounds talking to us,” Arnold said. “It’s fun when a lot of people are moving past different sensors at once.”
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com
Deeper into “AGLOW,” there’s a “mushroom choir,” as Arnold describes it. “As you pass these oversized mushrooms, they will sing to you. If mushroom could sing, what would it sound like?” She said there is an audio representation of the mycelia, the root-like fungi structures that can send messages to different mushrooms. The aural and visual experience shifts with every step and seems to flex to the cheerier side of the “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” soundtrack.
“I get the most childlike joy out of the mushrooms,” she said. She compared “AGLOW” to “wonderland,” referencing Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
There are some wetlands areas that remain relatively untouched. “It’s really important to be respectful of the space,” Arnold said. “Building out more things in the wetlands space is going to require some extra thinking without disturbing it.”
Near the end, visitors walk through a hill of blooming flowers. “You get the right angle, you feel like you’re inside a dandelion,” Arnold said. Plus, there is a special visual show highlighted by oversized, lit seeds that require five people to set off separate sensors at once to make it work.
In the future, Arnold said, the museum plans to make “AGLOW” available from October through March.
IF YOU GO
“Wildwoods: AGLOW,” through March 5, dates vary. $22.95-$32.95. Fernbank Museum, 767 Clifton Road, Atlanta. 404-929-6300, fernbankmuseum.org.
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