Purplish & Cruel, 2008

Plasma display, polyethylene, acrylic single-channel video

42 x 25 x 10 inches

Purplish & Cruel is the first of a series of semiotic exercises intended to explore abstracted relationships between language and images.  In this case, a passage from Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” is used to search for web-images with similar descriptions, thus translating his linguistic tropes through the mediating agency of the Internet.  As these images are collected and arrayed on screen, they are further removed from their original sources and embedded in a visual language composed of color, motion, and forms.

Apotheosis, 2006

Steel, PC monitors, polyethylene, 12-channel video

24 x 6 x 4 feet

In Apotheosis, color emanates from a 10-minute video loop played on PC monitors stacked four high across the length of the wall and covered by vacuum-shaped forms. The video, white with a red center shifting to blue with a white center, creates a flow of color as it moves across the grid, the color settings on the monitors creating variations from pink to orange, purple to blue. “I’d been looking at a lot of Basilica paintings, the apotheosis of so and so... the texture of angels, of clouds, becoming denser and denser until it came to the oculus,” Rice explains. He intended Apotheosis as an experience of a physical evaporation into the ethereal, he says, recognizing, however, that people may have an opposite experience - of a cool, impersonal, technological blue changing to the warm biomorphic pink of desire - depending, in part, on where the loop is perceived to start.

-- Elizabeth Bryant, Art ltd (excerpt)

Philo’s Cave, 2005

Wood, CRT monitors, polyethylene, 5 channel video

5 x 5 x 1 1/2 feet

Rice builds on the work of his erstwhile predecessors, hiding the screen like Turrell, making industrial light spiritual, like Flavin. But programming of his video sources is more complex, his installations and the concepts behind them, much more involved. Take Philo’s Cave, for example, another display based on naked black and white TV tubes covered with plastic hoods. In the installation, five small monitors flicker on a set of vertical wooden shelves. This time we are invited to peek at what’s on TV, since Rice has left a small peephole at the snout of the plastic cover. What we see inside –barely – is a snatch of a Balinese shadow puppet play, created and filmed by the artist. But the puppet show is part of the subliminal message of the piece; what we perceive once we take our eye away from the peephole aren’t puppets and poles, but merely a chorus line of flickers, with a dark horizontal scan line traveling across all five screens at once, again and again, an abstract visual metronome beating time.

The title of the piece can be taken on several levels. The ‘Philo’ of Philo’s Cave is Philo Farnsworth, the tormented figure at the heart of the invention of television, but the title also refers, of course, to Plato’s Cave. Like the cave dwellers Plato described in the Republic, we poor viewers mistake the shadows of the puppets, transmuted by electronics, for reality. Rice very cleverly and engagingly suggests that rather than bring us closer to the forms of the real, Farnsworth’s television has only pushed us further back into Plato’s Cave, and that much further from direct experience. 

–Gary Faigin, Artdish (excerpt)

Untitled, 2006

CRT monitor, polyethylene

The most revealing piece in Tivon Rice’s spectacular array of video-powered light displays is the smallest and the most straightforward. A tiny, black and white television screen sits on a shelf, its tapering glass tip wired into hidden components. A mirror image of the same TV tube, molded from milky white plastic, is glued onto its front, covering the screen. Along the rim where the two elements are joined, a tiny bit of very intense television activity is visible. The pulsating, sparkling edge (created by video snow) gave me the impression of a swarm of electronic bees, buzzing in furious protest of their carefully engineered confinement.

All of the 5 installations in the Rice exhibition share this strategy of using television screens as source of illumination rather than information. No wonder those swirling electronic sparks are so mad – Rice has effectively put a bag over their digital head. Content isn’t the point, so much as the way that content is delivered, the intensity, rhythm, and color of the media stream. Given the hypnotic effect that conventional television tends to have on its viewers, Rice is turning the tables, using television not for its considerable mesmeric power, but mostly as a source of artistic light. Key to his enterprise is the peculiar flicker of the old cathode ray tube, familiar to all of us as shifting nighttime radiance we see behind a neighbor’s drawn window shades, here taking center stage.

–Gary Faigin, Artdish (excerpt)

History of Television: 1974 - 2006, 2006

CRT monitors, polyethylene, steel, 4-channel video

Although television is the identifiable magnet for Rice’s investigations, he strips away its seductive narrative possibilities for another more seductive and hypnotic level of representation.  With The History of Television Rice has made the ultimate conflation – the glowing cathode ray tube as the enlightened one, the Buddha.  Television is our god, the carrier of the light and the sort of transcendence offered by Simon Cowell, transmitting the promise of full participation in the culture, fit abs and no baldness.  Rice goes all the way with an homage to the most arresting of video artists the late Nam June Paik, except here Paik’s television doesn’t represent the Buddha;  it is the Buddha – a repeating image of peace and perfection glowing with the blue of sea and sky…two unlimited fields.  Marshall McCluan had it right and Rice has illustrated his famous line perfectly:  America (and perhaps the world) long ago traded the natural church of the landscape for the aura of the pixilated screen.  Please cow to Rice’s piece before you enter the temple – then go numb.

–Joan Mitchell Foundation

Resolution, 2007

PC monitors, polyethylene, 3 channel video, 3 elements, each 8 x 8 x 5 feet

Resolution… confronts you with three domes made up of beautiful, semi-transparent blisters that radiate with changing colors. While Resolution can stand on its own as a completely satisfying aesthetic experience, there is a conceptual skeleton that, once revealed, suggests additional ways of understanding the work. The pulsating colors are actually geared toward the colors in a fragment of the 1982 movie "Tron," the first movie to present a computer-generated world. The three mounds of Resolution represent the amount of red, blue or green in the "Tron" footage, but they also simply glimmer alone in the huge main gallery at Lawrimore Project, creating an entirely new high-tech, fantastic world of their own. 

–Gayle Clemens, Seattle Times

Digital, 2004

CRT monitors, wood

12 x 16 x 12 inches

Osteotomy, 2005

CRT monitors, wood

10 x 14 x 10 inches

Panda, 2005

Collaboration with Jeffry Mitchell

59 minute video

Absolutelessness, 2008

Performance for six dancers, two-channel audio, four-channel video projection  steel, polyethylene - four “pixellation screens”, each 1 by 6 by 8 feet

This performance was part of Dancing in the Digital Domain, a collaboration between The University of Washington’s DXARTS and Dance Departments. The audio/visual environment was based on the mediation of human form and presence by systematic (digital) imaging and communication.  As dancers move between projected light sources and an array of sculptural pixellation screens their bodies and motions are reduced to rigid geometric forms, absolute values.  In an effort to transcend this cyber-abstraction, individual characters struggle to communicate beyond the confines of their framed environment through an evolution of gesture, sound, and language.

Yet to be titled - 2008

LCD monitor, custom electronics, silicone rubber, acrylic, polyethylene, LEDs

60 x 12 x 6 inches 

This interactive sculpture allows the viewer to engage with a small, soft touch pad below the monitor to manipulate the video.  The shifting colors of the resulting image are then swept over the illuminated sculptural elements to the right.