Pick a neighborhood in North America, from Newport Beach to Newark. Walk its streets at night, you’ll see the flickering colored lights of televisions talking to each other in living rooms, dens, kitchens, bedrooms and baths.
The cathode ray light that saturates most of the world didn’t exist until Philo Farnsworth invented it in 1928. Because he believed that corporations could be trusted, his career was a sad one. The honor they didn’t give him came after his death, when Nam June Paik in 1974 turned what Farnsworth had wrought into art.
Although Paik is interested in everything about television, its shape and sound qualities, its pretensions to realism, its hallucinatory snows, blips and flickers, Seattle’s Tivon Rice is interested mainly in Farnsworth’s light.
Rice’s focus differentiates him from most of the major light artists who precede him, such as Dan Flavin (fluorescence) and James Turrell (fictionalized ethereal).
From the specific, Rice moves from the spectacular and down to the humbly interactive – tube as church and tube as intimate companion.
Pink Noise: From a finger (2008) is part of his current exhibit at 911 Media Arts Center. Rub the fleshy screen under the single digit and another will appear to do what you’re doing, from gentle massage to nervous scratch.
Through Tuesday at 911. All Rice images from Lawrimore Project. More images here.
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