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A close up view of a group of glass panels. Each individual piece was carefully crafted to be integrated into the overall design of "Lituus."
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Over Spring break artist John Rogers installed a color changing glass art sculpture in the lower winter garden of the new Rainier building.
The piece is built in a spiral fashion with curved metal pipes suspended from the ceiling that span 90 feet and support slats of dichroic glass.
Dichroic glass contains layers of metal oxides which give the glass the color changing effect known as dichroism.
"It's a thin coating of metals that is fumed on with a vacuum at about 200 degrees," Rogers said. "When light goes into that coating it bounces back at its particular wave length and changes depending on the way you look at it."
As the sun moves and your position relative to the glass moves, the glass not only changes colors but reflects colors as well. When the light strikes the glass, colorful projections and reflections are created that move and change shapes on the walls of the Rainier Building.
, "It's a real technical glass, it's a passive mirror, it projects one color and reflects its complimentary color," added Rogers. Rogers stated that he used Cyan in the piece because it reflects an array of colors.
Rogers was born in Oregon and graduated at Portland State University where he studied science and ceramics. Rogers is much more than just an artist, he is a builder and an engineer as well.
"My father was a contractor, I learned all the carpentry trade skills at an early age," Rogers said.
One thing Rogers prides himself on is combining both organic and scientific elements in his pieces. He often reuses and recycles his materials too. The piece in the Rainier building is actually made up mostly of reused and recycled materials.
There are also a lot of different meanings behind the piece that can be interpreted differently for each individual. Rogers likes the scientific and metaphorical elements present in his pieces to be open to interpretation.
"I aim to create art that will prompt different reactions depending on the involvement and imagination of the viewer," Rogers states in his biography.
There are a lot of elements behind this piece that students enrolled in either Math or Science classes in the Rainier building can study and discover for themselves.
"At every angle it is viewed at, it appears to be a new piece of art. From the second floor, it seems to resemble a dragon, but when standing at ground level, viewing from the north, it looks like a glass vortex that's ready to pull me through time," Julia Christian, student, said.
Rogers recently named the piece "Lituus" which in mathematics means a spiral in which the angle is inversely proportional to the square of the radius. This reveals yet another angle in which the piece can be studied from.
Rogers first got the job in 2006 when the Pierce College art selection committee met with him and initially took to his ideas and concepts.
"One of the values that we had as a committee was, if this is a science and math building, we want some kind of art in there that is going to embody Math and Science," Ronald May, division chair of the science and allied health department, said. "We wanted something that actually showed kinetic or movement."
May has many different definitions of what the piece means to him. One of them was that the spiral arrangement represented the planets.
"The spiral arrangement is kind of representing how the planets move in relation to each other." May said.
Rogers' light kinetic sculptures are installed and displayed all over America.
Locally, he has sculptures at Tacoma's new Police station, a suspended glass sculpture in the music building at Central Washington University in Ellensburg and a piece in Gig Harbor at the Peninsula Medical Center.
