Peter Alexander, one of the first generation Southern California Light and Space artists, began to develop his cast resin sculptures in 1965 using materials that were developed for commercial and industrial uses. For Alexander, using cast resin was the direct result of glazing and repairing his surfboards. While other Light and Space artists such as James Turrell and Doug Wheeler preferred immersive, experiential environments, Alexander created contained microcosms of translucent resin that seem to radiate an inner, soft, colored light. Color was always central to Alexander’s practice.
Small Cloud Box, a modestly-scaled cube, dates from the year Alexander, then age 27, graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. At the time Alexander described his boxes as “little rooms'' that functioned as “places to go.” These boxes were his first signature works. The nebulous gradations of color inside the translucent cube evoke turbulent clouds over a stormy sea, “like a small, immobilized chunk of mid-1960s L.A. sky, cut out with a miraculous saw and deposited onto a pedestal for close examination” as art critic Christopher Knight observed. The encased and billowy clouds, though tiny, seem very far away, recalling the clouds in a Dutch seventeenth-century landscape. Alexander created Small Cloud Box by injecting small quantities of hot wax into poured layers of uncured polyester resin. The polyester dried around the wax, resulting in nebulous forms that resemble cumulonimbus clouds suspended within the plastic medium. There are two extant cloud boxes; this example was retained by the artist until his death in 2020.
