SANTA FE, NM.- An exhibition of works by Helen Pashgian opened at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on November 6 and remains through December 5, 2026. An opening reception will be held Friday, December 6, 5-7 pm. The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.

Have you ever stared into an oncoming ocean wave to see it illuminated, brilliant blue-green, by sunlight pouring through it? That perfectly imperfect and shifting color. That luminous volume of light. But then the vision is gone in an instant - the wave crests, foams, falls. And you are left aching for another vision of pure color.

Light pours into Helen Pashgian's resin sculptures. The shape and shine of the spheres seems to somehow bend and hold light, pooling it inside so that they glow from within. The blues and greens are simultaneously ethereal and dense with complex depths. Perhaps like nothing more than a captured drop of ocean wave, held motionless in the gallery. The unexpected element in Helen Pashgian's sculptures is time. While light and color are obvious elements of Pashgian's art, inherent to the resin material she uses to create them, somehow time is a piece of the puzzle we viewers might miss. Time freezes that wave in place, long enough for the viewer to explore and study this phenomenon of light.

But even frozen in place, these spheres have more depths to offer that set time moving again. Each one contains an acrylic shape, trapped within the colored resin. The shapes create moody and impossible arcs and lines as the viewer moves around the piece. Transparently allowing the viewer to see completely through them in spots, blocking light in others. Some spheres are impossibly multicolored - with stripes of resin that are somehow translucent and yet opaque enough for the sphere to appear entirely blue on one side, and orange on another.

When Pashgian speaks about the influences on her work, she often returns to her childhood in Southern California. The quality of the light there is unique, she says, a cool light. But Pashgian also spent a good deal of time as a child exploring tidal pools. The connection between those brilliant and colorful watery spaces, filled with creatures and gleaming depths and her passion for creating light-filled, colored resin seems clear. In graduate school she focused on the unique ways that painters of the Dutch Golden Age captured light. But finally, it was science that brought these aspects of Pashgian's artmaking together. The plastics, polyesters, resins and other new materials being developed for aerospace technology following WWII in labs and factories around Southern California were a boon. Pashgian developed techniques and methods of working with these materials that scientists had not yet dreamt up.


Helen Pashgian, Untitled, (Dark Green Sphere with .75 in. Straight Rod), HP094, 1970s, Epoxy and Resin, 7 in. Diameter

One of the paradoxes of Pashgian's resin sculptures is that while their translucency aligns them with an airy lightness, with a weightless sort of insubstantiality, the pieces themselves contradict that alignment with their own dense, material presences. Walking among these sculptures, one begins to sense their compressed physicality. Pashgian herself often calls her pieces, "presences." They have an inherent weightiness, an aura that belies their incandescence. Like tiny suns - the spheres both radiate light and coalesce as what feels like the densest compaction of matter.

The wall pieces, square black reservoirs of resin, seem to make this contradiction more apparent. Here the inky liquid blackness of the pieces seems antithetical to light - until it illuminates the strange, colorful shapes embedded within the darkness. A rippling yellow shape, glowing green lines, a red roiling arc. These ghostly glowing images seem to emerge from the depth of night, or dreams.

We wander through the gallery, among these presences. Each one a dense and potent world of color and light. A moment caught. Each an opportunity for the viewer to participate wholly in the experience of perception.

For More Information:

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
554 South Guadalupe
Santa Fe, NM 87501
[email protected]
505-989-8688
fax 505-989-9898