March 4 - April 15, 2023
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.