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Lisa Hoke is the most recent in a series of Rice Gallery art-
ists 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
Vibrant
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
Vista
Lisa Hoke has done it by turning 100,000 strips of offi ce
supply store cover stock into a wall of fi ligreed color for
her Summer Window installation Light My Fire.
“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 fi nd 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 draw-
ing, 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 specifi c 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 fi ltering through the designs
creates a fi ligreed 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 fl owing 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.
—Kelly Klaasmeyer
Summer ’06 39
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