Artist and Antioch College Associate Professor Michael Casselli’s latest in-progress installation work started the way he said much of his work does: with an image before a thesis.

“Theme usually comes later in it,” Casselli told the News this month. “I have a visual sense of something, then I figure out what I want to do.”

The new work, tentatively titled “Landline,” is being created following the receipt of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Casselli is one one of 75 artists to receive the $5,000 award, which OAC describes as recognizing the “outstanding accomplishments” of Ohio artists and providing support to create new work. Casselli received the award during the OAC’s 2025 funding cycle; he previously received the award in 2013.

The award, Casselli said, came with no requirement to propose a specific project up front, but rather is “based on the work you submit,” reviewed anonymously. OAC judges described Casselli’s body of submitted work as “highly charged, didactic imagery that presents a worthwhile conversation,” and “haunting, but materially beautiful.”

Thus far, “Landline” is taking shape to live up to similar descriptions. The core image of the in-progress work is simple: glowing forms hovering in a line outdoors, sized and spaced uniformly so that they reveal the rising and falling shape of the land they cross.

“Originally, I wanted to have those Chinese lanterns that float away, but tethered from the ground up,” Casselli said.

In practice, the piece has turned into a series of engineering questions — which Casselli said is common for his installation work. Earlier installations have presented similar challenges: “Sins of My Father,” exhibited in Columbus in 2023, features a disco ball hovering over a stark, white twin bed, curtained by a continuously falling rectangle of streaming water and accompanied by a soundtrack of the 1975 PGA Masters golf tournament; as its title foretells, that work — which was part of Casselli’s submission to OAC — interrogates a complex parental relationship. “Spark Harp,” from 2013, involved electrified music wires suspended in the air, where they oscillated and threw dramatic sparks and crackles — a meditation on desire and danger.

“I really love the challenge of thinking, ‘Oh, I gotta figure out how that works,’” Casselli said.

With “Landline,” the challenge arises in heat and lift. He said the lantern idea depends on a reliable, controllable source of rising air — but sourcing already-made lanterns and safely adapting them proved impractical.

“I kept trying to get the Chinese lanterns to work with propane and torches and would catch things on fire,” Casselli said. “So I started researching hot air balloons, and there’s tons of information out there about them.”

Casselli said he began contacting balloon enthusiasts and studying plans; he started learning the language of hot air balloons: the balloon’s exterior is its envelope, typically made of ripstop nylon with a silicone coating for heat resistance. A propane burner and pilot light create the heat that empowers the balloon to rise.

“I found a picture of a Victorian burner with six different angles,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Oh, I can backwards engineer that.’”

He began mapping the balloon system, he said, the way he maps many installations: first in computer-aided design, or CAD, software, then in physical parts. His long background in performance production and technical direction, he said, makes creating models and workflows second nature.

“I can design everything into actual pieces, and then extract those pieces from the drawings and make them because everything is in scale, everything is exact,” he said.

In Casselli’s current plans, the objects in “Landline” would be tethered to landscaping stakes screwed into the ground. He’s designing the system such that a burner can be fired and controlled as needed, with an electronic valve and RC controls. Thus far, his hardware design is leaning into copper and brass, which he described as “very steampunk.”

“Right now I’m busy forming the copper tube to make the stuff,” he said. “I’ve got the coil done. I’ve got all the connections. ... It’s a slow process of building new things and making them work.”

Casselli said “Landline,” is, in part, “elemental,” as were many of his past installation works. He’s worked with water and electricity, and now fire — a natural component that fuels the work from the inside out.

“I could just stick [lanterns] up and have a light inside, but the idea is that it’s being driven by fire, and it needs that fire to be complete,” he said. “There’s a physicality that’s inherent in the work.”

At the moment, Casselli is aiming to complete a prototype unit before the end of winter, in the hope of seeing what the work looks like against a backdrop of snow. He envisions the Antioch College “golf course” as an ideal location for the installation, but hasn’t finalized that part of the plan yet. More important than the future location of “Landline,” perhaps, is how it will eventually be encountered: out in the open world, as folks pass by. Casselli said he’s drawn to creating installations that remove the built-in expectations of gallery viewing.

“There’s this idea of you happening upon it instead of me inviting you to come see it,” he said. “You’re driving down the road and you look over and there it is — for me, that’s really exciting.”

In that way, he said, he aims for “Landline” to be less an exhibition than an interruption — a glowing, hovering mark in the world that asks for attention without demanding expertise. As with all of his work, Casselli said that even when all of its component works are finished and displayed, “Landline” will need one more thing before it’s completed.

“I really feel it’s important that the piece isn’t actually done until someone sees it, until they engage with it,” he said. “Because that’s the completion of it. And it starts to become not mine. ... I don’t feel the necessity for authorship to identify that it’s mine.”

And though the body itself is typically not something Casselli’s work depicts, he said it’s a central figure around which his installations are built. Even when his work references the body through materials and risk, Casselli said he avoids the literal figure so that the receiver of the work can place themselves within it.

“My idea is that the viewer imagines themselves — that’s where the figure is,” Casselli said. “That’s why I talk about the viewer being the final thing — they put themselves into it.”

Casselli said there’s not yet a tight timeline for when “Landline” will appear, hovering and waiting for viewers to add the work’s final layer. But as winter eventually melts into spring, keep your eyes on the horizon, and you may spot one, two, three, four, five lights, glowing in the dark.