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Better than crystal balls: Helen Pashgian's art reminds us how to see
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SANTA FE — Critics have long described artists of the Light and Space movement as magicians, alchemists and wizards — myths that the artists themselves have, at times, perpetuated. James Turrell called light “a magic elixir,” and Robert Irwin said he sculpted with “energy fields.” I’m as guilty as anyone of indulging in such hyperbolic cliches, having used the word “magic” in a recent review of Larry Bell’s work. But if you go to Helen Pashgian’s show at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art expecting the sculptural equivalent of the illusionist Criss Angel levitating on a beam of light above a hotel, you’ll likely find yourself scratching your head, wondering, “What exactly am I supposed to be seeing?”
Some readers may be familiar with Pashgian’s “lens” pieces — translucent discs on thin pedestals — whose intended effects are clear-cut. A gallery attendant can say, “Watch this sculpture disappear,” and it does, or “Watch the edges. See how they change color.” But the current show focuses on Pashgian’s spheres and wall panels, which, although made from similar kinds of industrial plastics, are more understated than her lenses, and also more complex and multimodal in what they express.
If the lens pieces dazzle with a fanfare of special effects, the spheres entrance us with an Orphic music that beckons us to lean in and listen to that which lies at the outer edges of our perception. The very fact that I’m resorting to a music metaphor here is probably an indication of just how subtle and esoteric these sculptures can get. There’s no sound, obviously — just color, shape, shadow, translucency and reflection — but Pashgian mixes these qualities like chords in music, creating experiences that are more than the sum of their parts.
Think of wine. Back when I used to drink a lot of wine, my favorite was Amarone della Valpolicella, an Italian style known for its “ethereal orange aura.” I don’t know who came up with that particular marketing phrase, but more than one brand of Amarone uses it on their labels. As with a lot of wine-snob language, it’s hard to know how real the “ethereal orange aura” is, or whether it’s merely a collective hallucination, something conjured into existence through the power of suggestion. It’s not as though you pour it and — presto chango — the dark purple wine turns the color of a construction vest. But my friends and I certainly believed we could perceive glints of citrine and sunset-colored light when we swirled it around in our glasses. And the more of it we drank, the more we thought we could see it.
Now, if I were to pull a random stranger off the street and say, “Let me show you the most amazing orange light you’ve ever seen,” then pour them a glass of Amarone and shout “ta-da!” I doubt I’d be met with wide-eyed amazement. Yet for Amarone connoisseurs, chasing that ethereal orange aura is one of life’s pleasures.
Like a great winemaker, Pashgian creates her ethereal effects slowly, with meticulous care. Some of her sculptures require 15 or more poured layers of hand-mixed plastics, and a single layer can take up to 50 steps to create. Pashgian has been working with poured plastics for nearly 60 years, beginning in the 1960s as a resident artist at the California Institute of Technology. At the time, only serious chemical engineers, and a few other artists, had ever worked with some of these experimental resins, and no one had used them the way Pashgian did.
She started her first sphere in 1966 — an emerald-colored transparent orb with two tube-like forms inside. She completed it in 1967, after a laborious six-month process of shaping and polishing the outer form by hand. That piece is now in the Tia Collection. In the intervening decades, Pashgian has continued experimenting with new resins and acrylics, layering them in countless ways, and no two pieces have been exactly the same.
There’s a yellow sphere in Pashgian’s current show that’s nearly opaque. Someone at the opening compared it to butterscotch, one of my favorite candies when I was a kid. I hadn’t eaten a butterscotch candy in decades and struggled to remember what they looked like. Were they yellow with orange cellophane wrappers or orange with yellow cellophane wrappers? Pashgian’s sphere is yellow and there’s no wrapper, but the object casts what can only be described as an ethereal orange aura onto its pedestal.
Where was that orange light coming from? Pashgian put it there, somehow, but try as I might, I couldn’t see anything orange in the sculpture. An opaque yellow sculpture that casts an orange light is a delicious mystery that a former wannabe wine connoisseur and butterscotch lover such as myself could really savor. Obviously, I knew Pashgian hid a layer of orange in there somewhere. But she did it so expertly, so seamlessly, that I couldn’t see it. Nor did I wish to. Through trial and error, she had created a new object with properties never seen in nature, and I was happy to simply enjoy its alien beauty.
Most of Pashgian’s spheres contain “windows” that let us peer inside them. The butterscotch piece has such a window — a thin inverted pyramid — but when we look inside, it’s yellow through and through without a hint of orange. Another sphere looks almost black. When we peer inside, the black fades to indigo, gradually lightening to a bright diamond of pure white light at its point.
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That dark indigo piece reminds me of a Magic 8 Ball, the fortune-telling toy whose 20-sided die gives answers to yes-no questions. I remember the excitement of shaking one as a kid and watching through the window as a pale triangle emerged from the inky depths. The answers — “Reply hazy, try again” — were not particularly insightful, but the look and feel of the device was a source of endless fascination. From a purely sculptural perspective, a Magic 8 Ball is an elegant construction that uses simple physics to inspire wonder. And that’s what Pashgian gives us: elegance and wonder.
In addition to the spheres, Pashgian’s show includes several wall pieces that exhibit what look like colored ripples of holographic light. The oldest dates from 1980, and its crisscrossing waves of clear auburn and amber light look like the rippling light cast from a whisky glass onto the oak-paneled walls of an old, smoky bar.
Candy seen through colored cellophane, auburn light from a whisky glass, the mysterious liquid in a Magic 8 Ball, ethereal orange auras — our everyday lives are full of small visual pleasures like these, but how often do we notice them? I don’t always stop to see the beauty in the light glinting off my cracked car windshield or in the soap bubbles when I wash my hands. When we’re consumed with our own thoughts and feelings, such moments are easy to overlook.
Pashgian’s spheres are not crystal balls in the clairvoyant sense, or even Magic 8 Balls. But their strange harmonies of light, shadow, form and color have the ability to engage our senses, helping us remember how to see. That’s probably a good way to think about a lot of Light and Space art — not as magic tricks to entertain us in the moment, but as exercises to reawaken our eyes and minds.
