Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

The Confounding Lightness of Helen Pashgian

SANTA FE, NM – Helen Pashgian, the pioneering but long-underrated California light and space artist, recently took a break from installing her extensive retrospective here at SITE Santa Fe to recount one of the defining moments of her life, such as 3 years old she had accompanied her family from their comfortable accommodation in Pasadena to their summer cabin in a secluded bay north of Laguna Beach. She was regularly prancing down to the shallow tide pools when suddenly one day she noticed light shimmering from the windswept surface of the water and then, less than a foot below, the same light shimmered quite differently from the scalloped sand.

“Granted,” she explained, “my little 3-year-old brain couldn’t really tell what was going on, but I was completely absorbed in the play of this light.” She paused before giving an expansive sigh: “And I remember it like it was yesterday.”

It wasn’t yesterday.

In fact, it was almost 85 years ago, and in the meantime this light-loving toddler grew into a lanky, light-loving teenager (swim team, surfer, intrepid explorer of the mountainsides just behind the Altadena family’s home) and then a light-obsessed academic specializing in art history (especially Vermeer and Rembrandt and the light-obsessed artists of the Dutch Golden Age). Moved through Pomona College to graduate from Columbia and Boston College to the brink of Ph.D. pushing into Harvard, she objected instead. At another crucial moment, she woke up instantly one night to realize that she had to go back “to the scent of eucalyptus and, of course, the translucent light of Southern California,” and to find a tangible way she wasn’t sure how, though definitely not academic to deal with this actual light.

So she became one of the founding members of the group of artists (including Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Peter Alexander, and others) who forged the movement of light and space that embodied the Southern California art scene in the late 1960s and 1970s and since then. Even if one of the least known. That is, until relatively recently, when their distinctive shapes – pillars, lens disks, and spheres that are not only activated by light, but somehow also harbor it and confusingly reveal it from layer to layer – were widely celebrated.

When things started to turn for Pashgian in 2011, with Getty’s Pacific Standard Time reappraisal of local art history, last month 2021 proved the real annus mirabilis when it comes to Pashgian things (she speaks her name Pash -KIN off). in particular, the successive openings of their first New York gallery exhibition since 1971 (through January 8 at Lehmann Maupin’s West 24th Street outpost in Chelsea); this solo artist retrospective at SITE Santa Fe (through March 27); and then a large light and space exhibition at the international art center Copenhagen Contemporary (until April 9th), in which your own contribution to movement is in the foreground for the first time. Radius Books also publishes a magnificent full color monograph dedicated to her, “Spheres and Lenses”.

Pashgian, who still lives and works in Pasadena, is regularly asked if she thinks her art has been reviled for so long primarily because of her being a woman, and her answer is always the same. “No,” she says simply and definitely.

Others disagree: for example James Turrell. Coincidentally, Turrell also grew up in Pasadena (his father was the principal of Pashgians High School, and their families were friends) and he also went to Pomona, although he is eight years younger and they had relatively little contact up until a couple of decades . Reached by phone, Turrell insisted: “Of course as a woman she was disabled. In fact, there were three things that stood in the way of her: she was a woman, she was beautiful, and she came from a family with a certain middle class. So she would definitely not be taken seriously in this macho competitive environment. But luckily she’s finally here, the time has come, and she deserves all of it. ”Turrell paused. “I suppose one reason she’s so adamant that she wasn’t accused of being woman in the early days is that today she doesn’t just want to see womanhood as weight.”

“I just did my job with my head down,” Pashgian told me, “and honestly, I preferred to do it alone. In fact, I stayed in Pasadena the entire time, which was about as far from everything to the guys on the Westside as Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin were here in New Mexico, and I did so for the same reasons as them and for the same benefit. In any case, I was hardly ignored. I had a steady, albeit smaller, gallery presence. And then it took a long time for the materials I was researching – the resins and the urethanes and the epoxies and so on – to mature to the point where I could really start doing what I wanted with them. “

Unlike many other artists (Koons and the like), work, practical and solitary, was always the focus of their work. She described how upon returning to California in the mid-1960s, she was invited to spend a year with a few other artists to explore the artistic potential of newfangled materials that had just been released by the military. She brewed a thick block of polyester resin sixty inches in diameter, a material of almost ridiculous lethality, and then spent weeks stepping on it, sanding the edges with weight machines and culminating (after a buffing process) in the giant shiny lens, vertically mounted on a pedestal, which turned out to be the undisputed hit of the artist exhibition in the Caltech gallery. In fact, it was so valued that within a few nights of the show opening, it was somehow stolen and never seen again.

Unimpressed, Pashgian persisted. While most of the other light and space artists (who had arrived on the path of painting) were busy dematerializing the object, Pashgian seemed to come from the other side, trying to create objects that really materialized light. She went on to create a series of gorgeously brightly colored bowling ball-sized balls (clear, colored epoxy that encased cast acrylic shapes), the insides of which seemed to change disturbingly moment by moment as the viewer walked around them. Likewise, a series of glowing flat pieces seemed to dig deep into the wall until the viewer moved, whereupon the internal shapes seemed to deform and then disappear completely.

Twenty years later, she continued her aesthetic investigations while retiring somewhat from the art world for a few decades to take care of her aging parents and support her alma mater, Pomona College, as a trustee. But around 2006 she plunged into full artistic engagement again in a series of increasingly sublime confusing pieces.

To start with, there was a new line of lenswork – 30-, 45-, and currently 60-inch discs, made in exactly the opposite way to the one stolen at Caltech. “I started experimenting with a sequence of thin urethane castings into a flat, concave shape: 12, 15, 18 layers each, each with a slightly different pigmentation over slightly different sized spreads,” she said (the trick is to change the colors to get?) pure, so that after placing the lens on a translucent base they do not get completely muddy when they are seen one behind the other).

The urethane wasn’t quite as dangerous to work with as the polyester resin, even though it contained cyanide, so Pashgian still had to be masked with respirators and goggles. Through trial and error, she developed precise protocols for the casting operations – 50 steps in meticulous order. “Half the work is technical and half aesthetic, and I have to split my focus between the two modes, from one moment to the other totally dedicated to one or the other.” But the results (both Santa Fe and Lehmann Maupin offer several examples ) are breathtaking.

Viewed frontally from the other side of a room, illuminated by recessed grazing lights in a five-minute dimming, twilight and brightening rotation) they seem to float, a mist-like cloud of not entirely certain, which pulsates through various configurations of width and tint. Pashgian says she loves to let the eyes and minds work against each other in a vertigo on the cusp of knowledge. Sometimes the appearance seems to freeze for a moment into a look that looks back at the viewer, and the effect can be almost existential.

The highlight of the SITE Santa Fe show, however, is on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (whose director Michael Govan has become a huge Pashgian fan): a ghostly colonnade of 12 translucent double columns made of molded acrylic panels above a dark, hangar-like expanse . In each cavity, Pashgian has secreted a different tangle of mysterious reflective shapes that project a constantly evolving play of shadows of images and colors onto the outer skin of the transparent tubes: when you walk by you see things and then you don’t, an effect both futuristic and deeply original.

It’s almost impossible to capture Paschgier with still images, even though the Radius book comes as close as I’ve seen it; Video tends to capture more, if not all, of the experience of being in the presence of these works. The SITE show is called “Presenzen”. Paradoxically, however, the word “presence” implies the exact opposite of present tense immediacy; rather, it conjures up the experience of being over time, the duration that Pashgian now sees as central to the experience of light.

Speaking of time, when asked how it finally felt to do that career-buzz retrospective in Santa Fe, the 87-year-old Pashgian shot back, “What are you talking about? This is just a mid-career survey. Wait until you see what’s coming! “

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