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Quantified Aesthetics
March 12 – June 18, 2010
Numbers surround us. They mark our days, keep us on course, drive commerce and sustain civilization. The need to order our world is an innate human characteristic. From the mundane to the mystical, "Quantified Aesthetics" -- a new exhibition from Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) -- examines the art of this practice through artworks featuring numbers, formulas, codes, counting systems and a variety of other mathematical organizational schemes. Artist’s books, prints and mixed media work by 45 artists from eight nations will be presented in this unique exploration, curated by MCBA’s artistic director Jeff Rathermel.
Opening reception: Friday, March 12, 6-9pm.
Featured artists include: |
All exhibits and associated events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.
Sample works at left, from top:
Sun Young Kang (Pittsburgh, PA)
The Way to Be Empty, 1 (detail)
Hand-cut transfer print on Okawara paper, Coptic bound book in a Banana leaf paper covered clamshell box. 6x9x1" book in 7x10x1" box
The Way to Be Empty, 1 is based on the idea of 108, a significant number in Buddhism. The number 108 is created with a different combination of fourteen words -- evoking a sense (eyes/ears/nose/tongue/body/mind), an aspect of time (past/present/future), a characteristic of the heart (pure/impure), and an emotional preference (like/dislike/indifferent). Each combination constitutes one of the 108 Buddhist desires. My working process is a meditation, as is the experience I want to give to the reader. The act of cutting 108 pages and printing 108 different combinations of 14 words is one that empties my mind of desires. As readers turn the pages, they participate in that meditation, similar to the Buddhist practice of repeating vows 108 times and telling 108 beads. The path of piled desires gets smaller and smaller until finally the reader reaches the emptiness at the end of the path, the last page.
Jo Cook (Mayne Island, BC, Canada)
The Road to Disappearance: 24 Celestograms (detail)
Laser print on Southworth (text) and Waste Not Paper (cover), 8.5x5.5", edition of 60
Completed during the late summer of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, The Road to Disappearance is a record of transcriptions of 24 transmissions Zorn received from Planet Coelan DZ_13IX. In a letter to her friend Charlotte Millis dated June 29, 1947, Zorn describes the process that led to her typewriter becoming a decoding machine:
"Since early May I have been taken over by an unintelligible language that I have not only been hearing but also seeing—particularly when I am out walking in the early morning. I have made a number of attempts to draw these hieroglyphic-like encryptions but failed to reproduce anything close to what I am seeing until I began working with a typewriter. The mechanical appearance of typewritten symbols and words approximates the visual static and noise of inscriptions written on air, hammered across Time & Space."
This book is a facsimile edition of the manuscript found in Zorn's desk. She was in the process of preparing the pages for publication shortly before she disappeared.
Susan Collard (Portland, OR)
3x3
Acrylics and mixed media on birch aircraft plywood and walnut, board book binding with Japanese repair tissue and Tyvek, woodburned maple covers. Three volumes, each 4x4x3-1/8"
This small set of books creates consecutive character sketches of the cardinal numbers one through nine. Each brief description is accompanied by an assemblage on the facing page -- an abstract "portrait" of the number using the face of a child’s block cut into pieces. All text is by the artist. Accompanying tally marks represent the same text written in New Ogham, a phonetic alphabet of the artist’s devising.
Jamie Ash (El Prado, NM)
Fibonacci's Tower (detail)
Acrylics, wood, aluminum, 29x12x6"
The work consists of 6 "pages", each 1" deep, hung on an aluminum ladder structure. These pages have heights of the initial numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence, from top to bottom: 1", 1", 2", 3", 5", 8". Though the text in the pages explains the Fibonacci series, my goal with the heights of the pages is to give a visual interpretation of the proportions of Fibonacci numbers. The small chapbook contains information on the historical Fibonacci, the formula of the Fibonacci numbers, their observation in natural forms and their application to practical mathematics.
Cristina de Almeida (Bellingham, WA)
Containing the Navigation
Digital prints, 10x10x1/2", 46 pages
Considered a milestone of travel literature, the 1578 book History of a Voyage to the Land of Brasil by Jean de Léry was a combination of ethnography, adventure story, and religious diatribe. Through a series of diagrams, charts, and notational systems, this artist book reinterprets Léry's prose. Each of the original chapters was collapsed into one double spread, where a set of bars represents the paragraphs of that chapter. Their lengths are directly proportional to the line count of the text, and they are color coded according to their main rhetorical purpose, such as descriptions, narrations, comparisons, etc. On the right hand side, a visual map plots specific aspects of that chapter. Overall, the book utilizes aesthetic cues as means for methodically analyzing a literary text, thus revealing quantifiable patterns of its verbal contents.
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