"Resolution" | Stunning multimedia exhibition illuminates the imagination

I almost hate to write a lot about the stunning exhibition of work by Tivon Rice. Can I just say "Go see it" and be done? In a moment, I will describe some of the smart, sophisticated concepts driving the works of art, but having an uninformed, immediate visual experience — just taking them in without knowing the intellectual background — is extremely rewarding. The works of art, with their glowing, colorful forms, are organic and technical, sensual and cerebral — even the small ones elicit wows.

Rice creates gorgeously weird translucent plastic forms that generate vague associations with swollen body parts or sci-fi horticultural experiments. The works throb and glow with light and color that shines through the plastic from TV-type monitors. While reveling in the layered visual experiences, my mind kept searching for the most appropriate metaphor — all the bizarre forms reminded me of something that I couldn't quite pin down. As it turns out, this kind of tension between what you see and what you know — or want to know — is exactly one of the ideas hidden within Rice's work.

"Resolution," the biggest work in the show, 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.

"History of Television 1974-2006" is a line of glowing globular forms, attached to monitors that display flickering, abstract mandalalike designs. The work, as hinted at in the title, is an homage to Nam June Paik's influential 1974 work "TV Buddha," a video installation that presented a sculpture of Buddha endlessly contemplating his own real-time digital image on a TV screen. Knowing this reference provides more intellectual and visual thrills, as you can then recognize that Rice's smallest blob is actually a Buddha vacuum-cast in plastic. As you go down the line, the Buddha's form becomes more and more abstract and swollen, while certain identifying traits remain still visible. Through this experience, Rice creates a process that is akin to the way digital media distorts reality and detaches viewers from original sources.

Rice's use of monitors as sculptural elements might remind some viewers of art by internationally acclaimed Northwest artist Gary Hill, and there are similarities in the two artists' romantic and conceptual uses of technology. But Rice, a 2006 MFA graduate from the University of Washington, combines technology with other weirdly seductive forms and uses such drenched color and light that the effects are immediate, sensual and entirely unique.

Rice states that "video, digital arts and experimental media have become some of the most accessible artist's tools as of late, but much like the socially isolating nature of television and the Internet, digital art is often inaccessible and impersonal to the viewer." Rice's sculptures are anything but inaccessible and impersonal even though their conceptual frameworks can be invisible initially. Fantastic and visceral, the works nurture visual and intellectual absorption. Beautifully installed at Lawrimore Project, the show represents another hit for the almost one-year-old gallery.