Tivon Rice at Lawrimore Project

Lawrimore Project--a 6,500-square-foot space that was formerly a sign shop--has in the year since its founding proven to be a pioneering venue for visual art in Seattle. The artist-architect team Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, known as Lead Pencil Studio, designed the gallery employing modest materials in unusual ways. For example, cement backer board, a preparatory surface for tile work, serves as the walls of the main installation area. This placing in view of what is normally hidden suits the work of young Northwest artist Tivon Rice, who recently showed sculptural installations of television components and video light that shifted attention from front to back and outside to inside.

All the works shown employed cathode ray tubes (CRTs), the funnel-shaped glass elements behind older television and computer screens that enable pixels to be read as light and image. In three works--Philo's Cave (2005), History of Television 1974-2006 (2006) and an untitled piece from 2007--the CRTs were highly visible and surprisingly beautiful sculptural elements, coupled with variously positioned cast protrusions that echoed them. In History of Television, 16 CRTs hung downward from steel stands, cradled in transparent cast polyethylene. The illuminated CRTs acted as base lights for translucent cast Buddhas of about the same size that sat atop them. The work references Nam June Paik's TV Buddha (1974), in which Buddha contemplates his own image via closed-circuit television. Rice's installation plowed down the center of the darkened room with the iconic forms in a row, bulging up and out in ever-increasing size. The figures at the far end read more as blob than Buddha, swollen beyond recognition, identifiable only by being part of a sequence.

Apotheosis (2006), like History of Television, played on seriality, this time with a wall of monitors in 11 stacks of four each. Translucent polyethylene caps over the screens bulged toward the viewer. Rice re-injected these caps with compressed air as he molded them, ballooning the individual forms in unpredictable ways and imparting an individual "face" to each that opposed the monotony of the grid arrangement. The blank monitors were programmed to gradually shift in hue from pale pink to pale blue. This tranquilizing field of barely-there color was subtly ruptured every nine minutes as the sequence repeated with a little jump in the frame--a visual hiccup that jolted the viewer back into the present and into a heightened awareness of the viewing experience.

The largest work in the show, Resolution (2007), consisted of individually cast and inflated hexagonal shapes, a new variation on the usual sources. These translucent casts were joined together to form three glowing mounds, each approximately the size of a small igloo. Resolution was inspired by the 1982 movie Tron, which has a promotional tagline promising viewers "a world inside the computer where man has never been." The monitors concealed within Resolution's domes were programmed to light up in shifting scales of red, blue and green that purportedly replicated the color saturation in Tron's footage.

Radiant in the darkness, Rice's works initially seduce through gorgeous color and light. But his use of media components also invites viewers to contemplate not the image itself but its structure.--Suzanne Beal

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