HAVOC Gallery

05/21/2026

Farmer’s Market season has arrived.

Spend your Saturdays surrounded by golden lake light, warm sunshine, and a gallery filled with beauty, reflection, and wonder. HAVOC Gallery is open Saturdays from 9-2 during the Burlington Farmers Market season.

Come wander in from the sunlight and experience the glow.

05/07/2026

This Titanium Beauty here at HAVOC by Bruce MacDonald

04/29/2026

Joy Addition

I am veering way out of my lane here, and I hope that it is just a tiny jolt of awakening and not a reason to tell me to get lost. Although, I have been lost in the woods, and not just once. Notably, Belvedere mountain -- bikes, a disappearing road, no map, no phone, bushwhacking a beaver pond lined with bungee stakes... What are your favorite lost stories? That's not rhetorical.

In 1919, if you wanted to travel from New York to London, you might book travel on a lighter than air ship, a zeppelin. This was the most modern way to traverse the Atlantic. Fifty years later, we were standing on the moon. Fifty years.

As a teenager I saw a lot of rock concerts including the band Yes. They performed at a Civic Center in West Virginia with a stage set of lighted-up fiberglass shapes based on the artwork of Roger Dean. (Look him up). For the finale, red laser beams shot out of the front of the three heads of the blobular sea monster static contraption dangling above the band. Very trippy and bizarre. Last year I saw a show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Jump on over to YouTube and type in "Dead and Company, Sphere". The concert venue in Las Vegas cost 2.3 billion dollars and required a crane from Belgium to erect. The exterior is covered in a 580,000 square foot LED array that is the largest ever. The interior boasts a 160,000 square foot video screen with the highest resolution display on the planet with over 2.5 million pixels that happens to be acoustically transparent so the 157,000 speakers mounted behind can work their magic. The amplifiers and processors and drivers and cables weigh over 395,000 pounds. Suspended overhead. There are no pillars holding up the roof of the 10" thick concrete skin over a geodesic tension structure. Wave field synthesis is achieved using the beam forming capabilities of HOLOPLOT X1 arrays for the creation of virtual origin points utilizing pulse-width modulation, power factor correction and subwoofers. Sound comes out of the floor too. Yep, fifty years. Blinking lights and fiberglass to this. It requires a run-on sentence to explain.

In Beijing last year, a half marathon was opened to robots. They ran in a separate lane from the human competitors with the fastest finishing in 2 hours and forty minutes. The world record for people is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by the Ugandan, Jacob Kiplimo a month ago. Last Sunday, a 5 1/2 foot tall robot named Lightning won the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That took a year. So, how fast is technology advancing? Netflix took 18 years to accumulate 100 million users. Twitter took five years. ChatGPT took 10 weeks. Meta's Threads took 2 days.

Drone warfare? Boston Dynamics and their synthetic humanoid that can turn backflips? Chinese dance troupes of robots? A 7,598 drone aerial display of a dragon flying... This is the image to carry us forward -- a flying dragon -- the absolute bleeding edge of technology used to create something that is mythological that we don't need. Cool, yeah but, whoop de do...

What do you need? What would make your day or month better? I am not going to throw out suggestions and possibly skew your thinking. Just make a short list in your noggin or write it down somewhere, like the fridge or tattooed on your left hand. Now, let's band together and speak up. How to make things better seems like a stance worth reviewing daily.

Let's do it.

And of course, buy art right now. That makes things better for you AND me and your heirs. If you don't have any, museums take donations every day.

Peace and love y'all.
B mac

P.S. Can't resist: sunshine, sweat, concert tickets, sunshine, fresh water out of that well right there. Art openings. A bike tune up. Cheese. That guitar tone in "Le Serviette Noir." The moon when you can see the whole disc and it's a new moon. Need more of that bass line bounce in "Queen of California " live. The debate between northern harrier and sharp-shinned. A quiet knee. Maple syrup. More coffee. The stranger asking what I think is so funny. Open doors. Waterfalls. Did I mention sunshine? A rainbow, even a small one. Twilight light.

P.P.S. By 1970 the number of nesting pairs of bald eagles in the U.S. was around 450. In 2020, the bald eagle population stood around 320,000 birds. Fifty years. Let's do this.

P.P.S.S. Fifty years ago we got Joni Mitchel, Jackson Brown, Stevie Wonder, Return to Forever, Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Eagles, Rush, Boston, the Ramones, the Centre Pompidou, the CN tower, Anselm Keifer, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe, Christo's Running Fence (all 24 miles of it stretching to the coast in California), Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Matta-Clark...

What does Led Zeppelin have to do with robots? Art persists. 500 years ago (10x50) was the era of Michaelangelo and the High Renaissance -- Dürer, Pontormo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Bramante... Science progresses and technology leaps, constantly eclipsing itself. Art endures as the vision of an era, a time, a moment of humanity transfixed, a permanent monument of culture.

OK, I'm way out of my lane and can't stop. Structure be damned. What do we need? What do we want? Cancer cured. No bombing. Solar panels on every house even if the state has to buy them. (Why not? We are the richest nation in the history of civilization). Bigger national parks. Free education and teachers' salaries doubled. Brotherhood/sisterhood. Global women's rights. Tolerance. Neighborliness. Free healthcare for everyone. (Yep, all babies need attention regardless of their tan). Elder care. Organic food. Exercise as a prescription. Clean air. Term limits. Sanity. Constitutional amendments to guarantee democracy for this nation. Alliances. Handshakes and hugs. Peace. And love. Mostly that last thing. Do that. Now.

Whew. If we can bring back a bunch of birds, we can sort this. Don't try to prove me wrong. It won't work.

04/29/2026

“La Lune” in full, radiant color, now on view at HAVOC Gallery.

Experience this masterwork by Bruce MacDonald, where light, surface, and movement converge in a luminous, ever-shifting field.

04/10/2026

04/10/2026

Rainbow Titanium Slinks here at HAVOC by Bruce MacDonald. Leveling up in color here.

04/09/2026

Afternoon spring light on Bruce MacDonald's light sculpture "Lotus." First taste of sun in Vermont this week.

04/02/2026

New Titanium, new shifts in light and color. Here is the new batch of mediums at HAVOC. Come get yours.

03/26/2026

Light Pushers

I live in Vermont. Years ago I was swimming in an abandoned quarry, and as I was clambering out, my foot brushed against something that wasn't a rock or a stick or weeds. I fished around and pulled out a bowl-shaped metal object covered in the green slime of time underwater. Once home, I rinsed and scrubbed the debris off the surfaces to discover a low conical-shaped disc of metal with attached balls or k***s. The metal was fantastically thin and yet stiff and had a finish coloration that made no sense. From one angle, it is blue, from another green and, when resting on a table top, from across the room, it is violet. There were also subtle markings etched into the surface. I was younger with a family and put the bowl in a box in the basement. Recently I moved; the kids are grown up. And I pulled this thing out of the box...

I took it to an archeology professor at Middlebury College who said it could be old but doesn't match any cultural artifacts she knows of. She sent me to a friend in the physics department who sent me to a colleague at MIT who is a physical materials scientist, which yielded speculation about composition -- metallic, but no specific matches with known alloys, possibly an allotrope in a crystalline phase, but nothing he had ever seen before. Conclusions: phenomenal strength and stiffness, ultra-light weight, unknown surface finish that appears to be the material itself as opposed to some plated or painted coating. As I was leaving, he confessed to never encountering an object like this in his lab in forty years of research, and we should be open to the possibility that it is not of terrestrial origin.

I went back to the quarry as soon as the ice melted off with a mask and snorkel after doing some homework on the quarry. It is hundreds of feet deep and hasn't been in operation for 177 years. In two afternoons of holding my breath for all I could stand, I found nine more "plates." The largest was the deepest and I was only around fifteen feet down. After cleaning, I found they were all different in "finishes" but fall into four sizes, so far. One is cut into as though damaged in a fire, but the others are nearly pristine, no denting, no corrosion. They defy explanation as to purpose. One feels like a map. One a color photograph of a deep space nebula. One a device or part of a device like a microfiche or memory storage. The sense of them to me is possibly something to do with navigation, but a couple seem to be imaging atomic structure or energy fields. They also have a sense of time, though this could be my personal reaction to their presence. I am going back with a diver thanks to a grant from NEMOCA, the New England Museum of Contemporary Art. Scientific academia, at this point, is not interested in funding research into inexplicable artifacts. We are cataloging, numbering and photographing each of these objects for a comprehensive documentation of this project we are calling "Cosmic Debris." The objects are offered for sale after our measurements and imaging to help fund future research. We will publish a book on the data and photographs.

OR
Bowls of Light

What you are looking at are sculptures made of 99.9% pure titanium, brass and stainless steel with a dash of chrome plating, but the essence of the object, the heart of the art, is light. The colors on the surface of the titanium are created by wavelength interference. With a torch, or voltage in an electrolytic bath, I form a layer of a clear oxide on the surface of the metal that is 30 to 55 nanometers thick or roughly .0000016 inches thick. Light bounces off the surface of the oxide layer and light bounces off the surface of the clear oxide and this millionths of an inch differential creates a spectrum of color depending on the thickness of the film. There is no pigment or paint or dye. The color is pure light. Paint produces color through the absorption of particular frequencies. What you are seeing is exactly the same as the spectral color of a blue Morphos butterfly's wings or a soap bubble, the iridescence of a hummingbird's livery or the liquid spectrum of an oil film on wet pavement. The low cone shape of the bowl is designed to make this microscopic film generate a shifting range of different colors depending where the viewer stands. This bowl of light can appear blue or green or violet all at once. Or pink and yellow or gold or silver. The fierce purple overlaid on an electric yellow is purely light manipulation. This is physics at work. And our eyes, in all their miraculous functioning, struggle to make sense of what you are seeing. Photographs are pale shadows of the experience itself. If you could see this object in a darkened room it would be gray. These sculptures make the ephemeral permanent. The sculpture is not the piece of metal.

We have named this project "Cosmic Debris" and each sculpture is numbered, photographed and will be documented thoroughly with a book. They are all one of a kind. They are physically impossible to reproduce. Like you.

Bowls exist to hold "things." These bowls exist to push light.

If one were to "push light," would that make it go a tiny bit faster? Faster than light, so backwards in time. Stay tuned. I will get back to you yesterday.
Peace and Love,
Truth is Beauty is Magic,
B mac

P.S. Be aware that what you are looking at is the only one you will ever, ever see like it.

P.P.S. Each bowl comes with a wall hanger that permits one to show either side of the cone.
Bruce MacDonald

02/20/2026

Day one in Baltimore. Here we go! American Craft Council