Coming Soon: Hap Tivey curated by Anna Valvere
For more than thirty years, Tivey's art has investigated the phenomena of light. In installation, painting, sculpture and projection, he pursued the concrete experience of light as well as the emotional and theoretical implications it holds for the human condition.
As the computer’s graphic power evolved, Tivey developed a technique of using pen-plotting machines to create images on light sensitive surfaces.
Hap Tivey began creating light installations and sculptures during the late sixties in Los Angeles. By 1973 he completed a complex of interior light environments that he exhibited privately in his Pasadena studio. These early creations reflected the influence of L.A. light artists such as Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, with whom he collaborated on large-scale search light structures. Throughout the 70’s he produced a large body of light installations in public galleries that invited viewers into large fields of undifferentiated light, where they experienced intensely saturated color with apparently infinite depth. Many of those works produced the impression of looking into deep cloudless skies. In the case of the Irvine and Spring Street Situations, a viewer was literally enveloped by empty color and ambiguous space.