March 4, 2023 - April 15, 2023
Gallery reception is Saturday, March 4 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm.
Tom Eatherton (1934–2023) was one of the most accomplished of the California Light and Space Artists, that cohort of 1960’s and 1970’s era figures who’s gallery-filling, controlled-light room environments directed attention to the specifically “perceptual” qualities of the art viewing experience. Even more than the others, Eatherton doggedly pursued the alluring if ultimately quixotic dream of producing a direct and unmediated art experience detached from history and cultural context. “Not ‘symbolic’ but entirely ‘experiential,’” he would insist about his own work. If the results sometimes diverged from the artist’s sweeping ambitions, if “the ideal” struggled valiantly against the limitations of “the real,” then this, as they say, was “not a bug but a feature,” as now, particularly with the passage of time, the surviving material artifacts of this practice are practically aching with poignancy.
Less well known, perhaps, than some of his fellow Light and Space artists, Eatherton made early and important contributions to the genre, most notably “Rise” at the Pomona College Art Gallery in 1970 and “Guide” at the UC Irvine Art Gallery in 1974, both executed at the invitation of his longtime curatorial collaborator Hal Glicksman. The artist was also an early innovator in the emerging field of digital art. Among Eatherton’s later room environments was “Time,” created for Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art in 2008.