Photo © Helen Pashgian; 2014 Museum Associates/LACMA
Helen Pashgian may well be one of the paramount (re)discoveries of the Getty’s PST series of 2011. One of the few women associated with the Light & Space movement that emerged during the 1960s in Southern California, she was among the earliest artists to experiment with the type of industrial materials-such as epoxy, resin and acrylic-associated with this loosely affiliated group of artists. (Others include such celebrated names such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, each of whom Pashgian met through Jack Brogan’s renowned fabrication studio). Like her peers, it was not so much about the “industrialness” of the materials per se, but rather what they could achieve that traditional materials could not. For Pashgian, it was the impulse to capture the “thingness of light” that led her to initial experimentation, and has been a driving preoccupation ever since.
Light Invisible is a site-specific installation consisting of 12 double-elliptical columns arranged single file at regular intervals within a darkened room. Each of the nearly eight-foot-tall frosty white columns is individually lit from directly above, so that the acrylic pillars appear to glow from within. When first entering into the exhibition space, the columns appear identical. But that false impression soon evaporates, as it becomes apparent that within each pair, one column stands empty, while the other holds a mysterious object. Pashgian steadfastly guards the recipe for these secret ingredients-these shape-shifting, light-emitting entities that subtly shift and transform when viewed from different angles. This transformation challenges the eye, mind, and overall perception, and creates a visceral engagement with these glowing architectural structures. Stepping to the side and viewing the installation as a whole, a pattern emerges: the pastel-hued objects placed at different heights in each work forms a wave pattern-fitting for an artist who describes her earliest inspiration, at the age of five, as “playing in the tide pools near Laguna” and being transfixed by the “ripples of light” in the water. Decades later, the inspiration comes full circle, as these pillars of light both punctuate and create ripples in the darkness, like a child’s finger dipping into the ocean water.
Originally published in art ltd. magazine (July/August 2014)