Helen Pashgian is a pre-eminent member of the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Over the course of her long career, Pashgian has produced a significant series of sculptures composed of vibrantly colored columns, lenses, and spheres that often feature an isolated element appearing suspended, embedded, or encased within the work. Using an innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics, and resins, Pashgian’s works are characterized by their semi-translucent surfaces that appear to filter and somehow contain illumination. Pashgian thinks of her works as “presences” in space, which do not reveal everything at once. One must move around her sculptures to observe changes: coming and going, appearing and receding, visible and invisible—a phenomenon of constant movement.
Describing the perceptual effects of her lens works, Pashgian describes them as “very thin, shaped in many ways just like the round, thin lens in your eye. The smaller ones are 25 or 26 inches in diameter; the larger ones are around five feet in diameter. The small lenses have a width of about an inch and a half and the larger ones a bit more. But both taper to a very sharp edge at the perimeter. The lenses have one or two colors embedded, or cast, into the urethane; and the colors radiate out evenly from the center. The idea is that the color goes to nothing at the ultra-thin perimeter edge. And if the lens is formed correctly, you should see just the color in space, with the edge essentially disappearing so that you can’t determine where the work ends and where the space around it begins, as it were. You don’t want to see any edge and you also don’t want to see any pedestal. The reason I like the pedestal is because it does delineate the work in the sense that it’s holding up something that we are looking at. That “something” is an object, but the object becomes dematerialized. And that’s what I want: an object that becomes a non-object as we look at it.”
The Brooklyn Rail | February 2020 | In Conversation
New York Times | November 2021 | The Confounding Lightness of Helen Pashgian
