Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020: Helen Pashgian at Chen
Crossing Over concludes with a special installation by acclaimed Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian, the lone woman to join Caltech’s newly created artist-in-residence program in 1969. Two years later, she exhibited her first resin-based lenses at Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery. Pashgian’s radiant Lens of 2023, displayed in a temporary pavilion at Caltech’s Chen Institute for Neuroscience, reflects her longstanding interest in the effects and perception of light. “One must move around to observe changes,” she notes about the shifting appearance of her transformative works. “Coming and going, appearing and receding, visible and invisible—a phenomenon of constant movement. It touches on the mysterious, the place beyond which the eye cannot go.”