Vibrant Vista

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

Lisa Hoke is the most recent in a series of Rice Gallery artists to take a truckload of banal, mass-produced materials and transform them into something amazing. Tara Donovan did it by turning a million plastic drinking straws into an ethereal cloud-like wall for her exhibition Haze. Phoebe Washburn did it by taking 7,000 pounds of cardboard boxes and nailing them together into a massive vortex for her installation True, False, and Slightly Better. And now Lisa Hoke has done it by turning 100,000 strips of office supply store cover stock into a wall of filigreed color for her Summer Window installation Light My Fire.

Light My Fire by Lisa Hoke.

“I love that initial intoxication of color,” says Hoke. Her pursuit of color in past works has led her to employ mass-produced materials like plastic cups, paper, rubber bands, and zippers. Massing her materials together, Hoke creates large-scale installations of saturated color. “You can take the simplest thing,” Hoke says, “and find out what potential is locked inside it.”

There is a lot of manual labor behind the visual impact of Hoke’s installations. Creating Light My Fire for the gallery’s 16’-by-40’ window wall took Hoke and three assistants four solid months. The notebook-sized paper was cut into strips, and the artist’s studio became a factory as Hoke and her team took each one of the 100,000 strips of paper and wrapped it around a dowel to create a curl.

Hoke plotted out the window’s design in a marker drawing, then she gridded off the drawing to act as a guide for the 96 5’-by-5’ panels she had to create to cover both sides of the window wall. After standing each curl on end, she glued it to its neighbors, replicating the color patterns of the drawing. Once the panels arrived in Houston, Hoke and a crew of assistants spent four days attaching panels to either side of the gallery’s window wall. Because she was replicating the drawing on both sides of the wall, each panel also had to be matched up with its mirror image on the other side of the glass.

The whole thing had to be glued twice. First, Hoke and the crew used low-temperature hot glue to quickly but temporarily hold everything in place. Then, donning respirators, they applied long lasting, but reeking, silicone adhesive.

Since Hoke’s work is specific to a particular site, she never knows exactly how it will look until it is installed. Working this way has a built-in element of risk. She tested the paper curls on a small sample glass in her studio, but there was no way to anticipate what effect an increase in scale would have. But all the effort was worth it. On entering Sewall Hall, viewers are greeted with an immense wall of frothy color. Light filtering through the designs creates a filigreed pattern, and if viewed from an acute angle, the surface becomes a landscape of solid color. Because the paper curls are of varying heights, they give the design a topographical effect that casts shadows and varies the surface’s color.

The Summer Window Series was designed to allow the gallery to remain active even when closed during the summer months. But the light flowing through Hoke’s installation into the darkened gallery creates a stunning effect, so Rice Gallery director Kim Davenport decided to leave the gallery door open.