It wasn’t until I walked through the faded-blue door to Helen Pashgian’s Pasadena studio and she told me to put away my recorder and notebook that I understood this would not be a conventional interview.
“People keep rewriting my words more elegantly but not addressing the work itself or their own experience of it,” the California native told me as I followed her into the spacious 100-year-old warehouse she’s occupied since the ‘70s. “I’d like for us to do things a little differently, but first, I need to finish leveling.”
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Elegantly dressed in a cashmere sweater and pleated trousers, the 90-year-old artist, who neither looked nor acted her age, quickly leveled a concave frame poised atop an immense workbench. To this day, she continues to execute every detail of her sculptures with minimal outside assistance. The mold was not, as I’d presumed, for her upcoming installation “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” at the Getty Center —opening September 10, part of its PST Art programming—nor was it for her contribution to the concurrent exhibition“Crossing Over”—also part of PST Art—at Caltech, where in the ‘70s she’d been the first female artist-in-residence. No, those urethane and resin casts had long since been polished to perfection and photographed; this was for yet another impending project, the details of which were still too early to publish.
“I’ve definitely been busy,” she said, which seemed like an understatement considering the state of her studio and current exhibition schedule.
Though Pashgian was one of the preeminent members of the Light and Space movement that came to epitomize the Southern California art scene beginning in the ‘60s (along with Robert Irwin, James Turell, and Larry Bell), her luminous columns, spheres, and lenses have only recently received widespread recognition. After the Getty Center included her in a 2011 presentation reappraising local art history, Pashgian has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Santa Fe, St. Moritz, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Not to mention the many Light and Space surveys now foregrounding her contributions to the movement.
Yet, despite the influx of attention, Pashgian said few writers had captured the inexplicable experience of viewing her work. In their attempt to address the six-decade arc of the artist’s career, from her start in the ‘60s to the omission of her work from institutional surveys and, finally, to the late-in-life recognition of her astonishing material innovations (with polyester resin, epoxy, and urethane), a parsing of their encounter with the art itself is often cut short. So, instead of another interview, the artist asked me to join her in the chairs arranged before Untitled (Lens) 2024—similar save for the color to the one on view at the Getty—and just ‘feel what I feel’ and ‘see what I see.’
Comprised of nearly twenty urethane resin pours, the 50-inch ultra-thin disc—mounted vertically atop an almost imperceptible translucent pedestal—appeared to be floating. At the center of the milky green lens, where the radiating emerald color was most concentrated, an illusory pupil gazed out from an infinite depth. Pashgian offered a single instruction before dimming the lights: “In the beginning, keep your gaze trained as best you can at the top of the circle until I tell you to look away.”
As the room darkened, the lens shimmered greener than green in an affirmation of presence and power that felt, if not human, undoubtedly animate. When the overhead lights began to rhythmically rise and subside, the object dematerialized before my eyes. Upon Pashgian’s signal, I refocused my gaze, causing a fluorescent pink corona to surge around what was left of the disc, emulating a total solar eclipse. A rosy nimbus whirled around the periphery of the space. Not until I heard myself audibly gasp did I realize I’d stopped breathing.
Before I can tell you how it was, I have to tell you how it wasn’t. It wasn’t futuristic, overtly technological, or like a sequence of special effects. It was less ominous and less speculative than my research had led me to expect. It was astonishing, remedial, and—as dubious as this sounds—transformative. When I left Pashgian’s studio some hours later, I was not the same person I was before I walked through that faded blue door.
The spectral shadow play of color and form recalled natural phenomena common to Southern California, where the artist spent her childhood drifting between Altadena’s sun-stained peaks and the secluded coves of Laguna Beach. Across the ever shifting sphere: the effects of fog slowly subsuming a hillside, the sun stirring between the sea and sky, and ribbons of light refracting through shallow pools at low tide. Here, light, like water, appears to be in a near-constant state of transfiguration between liquid, matter, gas, and air.
Meanwhile, the oscillating levels of incandescence brought to mind historical artworks not unlike the ones Pashgian encountered while studying art history at Columbia, Boston College, and Harvard before returning home in the mid-‘60s to focus on making work of her own. Similar to the chimerical honeycombed muqarnas adorning the ceilings of ancient Islamic mosques, the lustrous gold and lapis lazuli pages of 6th-century manuscripts, the empyreal glow of the leadlight window in The Glass of Wine by Johannes Vermeer, or the oblique effulgence of Rothko’s late color fields, the urethane resin lens appears lit from within, emitting an ineluctable glow of its own formation while still galvanizing the surrounding light.
My sense of depth and distance only became further disoriented the longer I watched. The air thickened, slowed, and filled with what could be described as ‘the plastic fullness of nothing’ to steal a phrase from Robert Rauschenberg. Losing track of where I was in relation to the pedestal and Pashgian, I sensed the room was not so much fading as merging with the luminance. The apparition expanded and contracted, an outward ebullience and receding gravitational pull simulating the feeling of a benevolent embrace.
After using my shirtsleeve to wipe my eyes, Pasghian reassured me that crying was not an uncommon response. She recounted a studio visit with a curator who streamed silent tears, a man shocked less by the work than his own emotional outburst, and a woman who, for a long time, didn’t say a word, then suddenly began to sob hysterically. More than a year later, me, that same woman sent Pashgian a message describing how the glowing green disc had since become a familiar presence in her life, frequently materializing in hallucinatory clarity in odd places ranging from the center of a busy intersection to hovering above a remote mountain lake.
“Children, on the other hand, don’t cry or yell or misbehave at all,” Pashgian explained. “Sometimes, it’s even difficult for their parents to get them to walk away.”
While watching the disc’s circumference disintegrate, the diaphanous sphere defying the bounds of material dimensionality, it’s easy to see the appeal for those still receptive to wonder. As the poet John Lau wrote in his essay for Pashgian’s recently published monograph, when “experiencing her work, whether lens, sphere, or column, we enter a state of wonderment.” Indeed, bewildered by the limitless orb, the brain and the eye strain to reconcile the new perspective. However briefly, the real becomes unfettered from the concrete, the definitive margins between the self and the surrounding world blur, and the presence of another realm of existence just beneath the visible surface is revealed.
When Pashgian called me back to myself, I had no sense of how much time had passed. Rather than an unrelenting succession of discrete moments, the work facilitates an experience of time similar to the ongoing flow of interior subjectivity, where the past envelops the present in a continuous, seamless stream of perception. In this way, it’s possible to watch yourself watching and to observe your habitual approach to seeing from a slight remove. The occasion of introspection invites interior transformation, or that was the case for me.
“If we have time, you can come back here later,” she said. I forced my gaze away from the orb and onto her lithe form that was then enwreathed by a penumbra of white light and tried again to elicit even the vaguest sketch of her relationship to her creations. “I don’t want you to project my experience or my ideas onto them,” Pashgian said. It’s true that she doesn’t even title her work for fear of interfering with the viewer’s private perception. “Besides, there are still many aspects that remain a mystery even to me,” she said, smiling as the light clinging to her silhouette brightened yet.
At that moment, Pashgian seemed to disappear into the ambient glow, perhaps precisely as she intended it to seem.
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