ICELAND///YOKO ONO SEES THE LIGHT…

Yoko Ono’s new Imagine Peace Tower lights up Iceland’s night sky…

Few figures in the art world are as polarizing as YOKO ONO, but her most ambitious project to date, the “IMAGINE PEACE TOWER” which was unveiled in the presence of Sean Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison’s widow Olivia in Iceland yesterday, October 9th, on what would have been John Lennon’s 67th birthday, is designed to bring people together while honoring her late husband’s memory. Envisioned in 1967 by Ono as a sort of conceptual “light house,” the monument, located on Videy island, near Reykjavik, is comprised of a large, cylindrical “wishing well” structure adorned with the phrase “Imagine Peace” in 24 languages that projects intense beams of light skyward to form a temporary “virtual structure” similar to the memorial twin towers of light once projected at Ground Zero in New York. Scheduled to be lit annually from Lennon’s birthday on October 9th until the anniversary of his death on December 8th, the tower serves to project the handwritten wishes for peace collected by Ono from thousands of fans worldwide which now lie buried in time capsules around the tower into the sky. The artist chose the remote nation for the memorial’s location because of its environmentally and politically positive stance and also the country’s northern orientation so that, in her own words, “peace may filter down throughout the world”…