Standing outside Evoke is a 75-inch tall sculpture of limestone and gold leaf. Limestone is a solid rock formed over millions of years when calcium-rich minerals precipitate out of water, or when shells of marine animals settle and become compressed, sometimes maintaining their forms as fossils. Gold is a soft, malleable element, so much so that it can be hammered paper thin and applied to icons, picture frames….and carved limestone.

Otto Rigan’s Coming of Age is a result of his life-long exploration of light. The carved, pyramidal forms in the limestone are gilded and are juxtaposed with the natural stone. The gold mineral reflects and becomes light, appearing different in bright sun or cloudy skies. James Turrell, whose sculptures of light, color and space have earned him the title of “master of light”, says “Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.” Just as the gold in Otto’s sculpture becomes light, immaterial light becomes substance.

The gold pyramids also reflect colors around them—the trees or the color of your coat as well as the reflection of it on an adjoining pyramid. Otto notes that the color intensifies where the bases of the pyramids join and lightens toward their outer points. “Looking and Seeing” require a bit of fine tuning to appreciate the subtleties of the sculpture.

The fine tuning of the viewer’s perception is referred to by Arvo Pärt, the great Estonian composer, who wrote about light: “I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”

Otto recalls sitting in a Lutheran church as a boy, terrified by the sermons, but enraptured by the sunlight coming through amber glass windows as the transmitted light animated the pulpit and the other objects in the church.

“I was fascinated by light going through the lens of glass,” he explains. “When I got into college, I was studying to be a painter, but I always had an interest in glass. My only real knowledge of glass had been working with stained glass. I did an apprenticeship in my early 20s, learning about architectural glass and I became familiarized with the medium. I learned to handle it and I learned to understand it. And I learned to understand what light does. In other words, it's not just about making a window, it's about how it affects the environment.”

Later, working in Santa Fe, he learned that glass also has a compressive capacity roughly equal to that of granite. He began stacking discarded fire bricks from old kilns with sheets of picture glass he got from a local frame shop. “And sure enough,” he says, “it kind of worked. When you consider stone to be impenetrable and you insert a light seam of glass and it still carries the load, it works. So that’s how I ended up getting pretty serious about using it as a medium.”

An early sculpture is X#1 (Fred), 1988. Otto roams the stone yard of a quarry searching for pieces to work with—often looking for something to fit an idea but just as often getting an idea after finding a stone. The owner of the quarry once asked, “Otto, why do you always choose the ugliest rocks we have?” To which he replied, “Because there's room for a relationship. If it's an incredibly beautiful stone by its own self, I don't want to cut it. I don't want to do anything to it. I want to find one that enables me to do something with it. So as soon as I cut a straight line through you suddenly see an edge. As soon as you embed glass in it, suddenly you're seeing inside that stone. You take something ugly and make something that you almost want to embrace and that, to me, that's success.”

In 2015 he unveiled Genesis, a 24 by 40-foot steel and cast glass sculpture at Spaceport America in Truth or Consequences, NM, part of a commission he won from over 200 entries. It is an arc of COR-TEN steel that will continue to develop its patina of rust as its mirrored cast glass “stars” will mirror the stars above it as they appear at the summer solstice.

Otto’s weighty, substantial standing sculptures, his wall sculptures and his architectural installations have an unexpected lightness of being, life in the inanimate. As light animates Coming of Age and it reflects its environment, we’re given the opportunity to contemplate the complementary relationship of opposites.