"Kelly Arc" installation by Hap Tivey (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
This month, as part of its ongoing 30th anniversary, Elizabeth Leach Gallery is exhibiting the work of Hap Tivey, a pioneer of the light and space movement that includes fellow artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin.
Tivey's exhibit consists of two wall projections of pure color, each shifting slowly in tones and intensity. The ceiling-mounted video projections on the wall are framed into hand-sketched half frames in black paint. Each wall is also mounted with a simple sculptural form, one linear but curved like a horizon line, the other a diagonal.
The fields of color begin to feel like portals, in the way that a Mark Rothko painting does. As John Motley writes in his Friday Oregonian review, "the passage from soft peach and mauve tones to enveloping azures and purples" in the video projections "is barely perceptible from moment to moment, but when the chromatic saturation of the projections peak, the sculptural components of the installation trick the eye, suddenly seeming punched out and deep, not affixed to the wall."
Tivey's "Tilted Horizon" (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)
A few years ago I also profiled Tivey for The Oregonian, in a piece appropriately called "Light Master." I wrote then, "For anyone who has walked at night past a house with its lights on and shades drawn, wondering what goes on inside, Hap Tivey's exhibit at Elizabeth Leach Gallery ought to feel familiar." That show, "Sands of the Ganges," featured hybrids of painting and light boxes. I've been a fan ever since.
Perhaps most importantly in talking about his work here at Portland Architecture, I've long felt that Tivey, because of his passion for light as his ultimate artistic medium, would make for an interesting design oriented conversation. So that's what we tried to do by phone a few days ago.
"Light reveals our shared universe," Tivey says. "That is to say, certainly there is a tactile universe which is accessible without sight. But that’s not really a shared universe. If I say 'book' to you, you share cognition of a book with me. It’s cognition we’ve built using light. So for me, light literally reveals our shared universe. That could be the deepest universe perceived by the most sophisticated equipment. Essentially it is the characteristic that reveals to us our shared world. At the same time, we can say that there are some people who really love paint. And there are some people who love wood, or stone, or bronze, or water. It happens that I really love light."
"So how does one make light itself the artistic medium?" I asked.
Tivey's previous "Bay of Light" and "Causeway" (images courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)
"To put a viewer in touch with how light works, you have to put a viewer in touch with how they make light work," Tivey explains. "Light is the most ephemeral medium, and it’s the most viewer dependent medium. One person looking at a lavender color will have an ecstatic experience. One won’t. The way the light reveals the world to that person is important. So to me it’s the most important medium because it necessarily involves the viewer. I like to present conditions of light or situations of light to viewers in which they don’t normally engage but which they might experience under the rubric of experience. We experience a lot of that as practical: daylights or nightlights. They’re practically interpreteted, and sometimes aesthetically interpreted."
Besides his gallery and museum exhibits, Tivey has often, in his more than 35-year career, created installations in other buidings, often combining architecture and function. For a stand-alone tea house beside the Pietro Belluschi-designed home of local architect Mike McCulloch, for example, Tivey actually designed a color and light-filled shower in the bathroom. But he's also collaborated with more than one of the world's most acclaimed architects.
"It’s an interesting challenge, and one is most fortunate to be able to work with a sensitive architectic like Mike [McCulloch]," Tivey adds. "One of my first commissions in New York City as a young artist was in a Frank Gehry house. He’d rebuilt a house from Mark Rothko’s old studio on 69th street. Frank redesigned the entire interior of the building when he came to New York in the 1970s. The client asked artists to put art into various floors. I created a light installation on that ground floor that incorporated part of Frank’s design. It used a water element which was on that floor and cast light onto the water. It also took light from that room into a very small adjacent room. We created a light installation that was essentially a bath. The person would get into it and literally float. There were various veins and projections in the room that made the physicality of the room gradually disappear, in the same way that when you’re floating in water and your gravity gradually disappears. The space was small but it became infinite. The projects of light seemed like they could be from ten feet to a mile away. By organizing the darkness and the light of this room, I literally recreated the room in about six different versions."
Tivey's "Softside" (image courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)
"When I first started out…I used to build rooms that I’d take people into and surround them on a platform with light," the artist continues. "One could not see any material properties at all except what they were sitting on and their body. Once they came through the doorframe, everything around them was light. That’s called a Ganz field. Ganz means whole. The effect, which Terrell and others work with, is they cove out a room. I actually made the first one in 1968. I would take people into that space and they would experience their own response to that light."
Naturally, I asked Tivey to name some of his favorite architecture, or at least some spaces that evoke and sculpt the light like some of his installations. "There are a lot I love for how they work with light, but if I had to pick just a few, I’d probably start with the Pantheon," Tivey says. "When you get it on a reasonable day with that beam of light coming out of the sky and penetrating that space, it’s a breathtaking experience. If you look at somebody like Turrell and his skyscapes, he’s essentially making the Pantheon. There’s a hole in the building! But the Romans did it first."
The Louvre, Paris (photo by Brian Libby)
"IM Pei’s addition to the Louvre is to me also an amazing phenomenon, more in the realm of reflection than transmission. I’m quite fond of most of Pei’s buildings I’ve seen. There are some really remarkable ones in New York. The IBM building [designed by Mies Van Der Rohe] used to have this indoor bamboo forest atrium. That did a beautiful thing with the light. You were inside a building and inside a bamboo grove. So the light was coming though the building and through the grove."
"I think probably I would also cite some ancient architecture," Tivey continues. "There are some buildings I’ve been in Japan when I was a monk in the monastery there. There was some beautiful light that occurred. It primarily came from the walls rather than the ceilings. The way Japanese temple arch allows itself to open to light and the sky and particularly to changing weather is very moving."
IBM Building (image courtesy Wikipedia)
But of course it's still nature that inspires Tivey first. That's where light comes from, after all. "In nature there are some truly exceptional places," he says. "There’s something called a lava tube, which is basically a hollow tube in a lava field that’s created when the lava is still running but all of the surrounding lava hardens and the hot lava runs out. When you go into these lava tubes, you’re cold. There’s a national park in southern Idaho with very long lava tubes. Northern California has some as well. You look up into this geometry of the sky."
Tivey's show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (417 NW Ninth Avenue) continues through the end of the month February 12.
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