Festival is part of Town’s Optical series. Characteristically, he steals features from a current style and twists them for a new purpose—here the repeated discs and lines of the Paris-based Op artists Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005). He mixes these elements into a rich and dramatic fabric.

Behind a foreground layer of frantic activity that evokes jugglers, strings of lights, ticker tape, and confetti, we glimpse an intergalactic darkness in which writhe twisting, faintly painted nebulae made up of dashes, waves, and “doughnuts.”