Form Plus Function

Nestled beside a national wildlife refuge, the Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, N.J., seemed an unlikely place for an exhibit featuring art rooted in mathematical concepts. Nonetheless, in 2006, its galleries (now closed at this location) featured works by four contemporary artists whose art had a strong mathematical element.

The Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, N.J. Photo by I. Peterson.

Called "Form + Function: Mathematics and Beyond in Contemporary Art," the exhibit featured artworks by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Steven Gwon, Mark Pomilio, and John Sims.

Born in 1928, Sol LeWitt was known for his conceptual art (see "Incomplete Open Cubes," "Puzzling Lines," "LeWitt's Pyramid," "Stairwell Drawing," "Squares and Stripes," "LeWitt's Complex Form," "Thirteen Geometric Shapes," "Garden Pyramid," "Cube Tower," "Floor Structure," and "Wall Pyramids"). 

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work," LeWitt wrote in 1967. "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

LeWitt's series of vast wall drawings exemplified this approach. In effect, the artist conceptualized the work and provided the instructions—an algorithm—for what should appear on a wall. Assistants and volunteers then implemented the instructions.

For the Noyes exhibit, LeWitt contributed three wall drawings. Here are the instructions for these creations, each drawn in thick pencil on white walls.

Wall drawing #142: A twelve-inch grid inside an eight-foot square an increasing number of horizontal not straight lines from the left side.

Wall drawing #143: A twelve-inch grid inside an eight-foot square an increasing number of horizontal straight lines from the left side.

Wall drawing #167: A line from the center of the wall to the midpoint of top side, and a line from the midpoint to the right side.

Catalog cover, "Form + Function" exhibit, Noyes Museum of Art.

The instructions were curiously ambiguous and somewhat puzzling. Given just the instructions, I tried to imagine what each artwork would look like. (Try it yourself.) However, when I compared my imaginings with the actual works drawn on the walls, my images didn't quite match the reality. And it wasn't clear to me whether the instructions had been misinterpreted or were incomplete or whether the artist had provided additional guidance.

Steven Gwon's pieces typically consisted of colored pencil lines, hand drawn on sheets of finely ruled graph paper. The resulting sheets revealed spectral forests of subtly shaded lines, spaced at regular intervals and of precisely defined lengths. Seen from afar, these gently rendered patterns shimmered in the ambient light.

Gwon said that his drawings encapsulated days of the year, as recorded through numbers that measure time and space and through the colors of the spectrum—sunrises or sunsets; minutes, hours or days, months or years. The example on display, called Year, had 36 panels.

Pencil on Paper U by Steven Gwon. Courtesy of Steven Gwon.

Mark Pomilio's art wasn't explicitly tied to a grid. Instead, it explored, through layering and translucency, the geometry of growth and form. Pomilio likened his approach to the generation of a complex form from a single cell (or seed). His forms multiplied, grew, and overlapped to produce subtly complex, translucent landscapes of polygons, lines, and shadows, whether rendered in charcoal or deep, rich colors.

Family Circle VII by Mark Pomilio. Courtesy of Mark Pomilio.

Pomilio used his abstract works as ways to articulate, in a visual sense, profound recent developments in the life sciences, as seen in developmental processes and modeled by simple geometrical expressions.

Several large quilts provided an engaging introduction to John Sims and his visual ruminations on the digits of pi (see "Quilting Pi"). These square patterns mapped the decimal digits of pi to colors, starting from 3 at the center and spiraling outward from that point. Different choices of color led to intriguing variants—the same digits and arrangement in each case, but strikingly different visual effects.

Seeing Pi by John Sims. Courtesy of John Sims.

My favorite, however, was Sims's signature piece, which paired a representation of a tree with a branched, fractal structure (see "Fractal Roots and Artful Math"). It highlighted the connections that Sims saw among mathematics, art, and nature (and presented his own vision of growth and form). In different orientations, this dual image encoded a variety of relationships and concepts.

Mathematical Art Philosophy 101: With Titles (Square Roots of Tree, Mathematical Art Brain, and Tree Root of Fractal) by John Sims. Courtesy of John Sims.

"What is exciting about all this is that these individuals are making work using systems with innumerable applications," curator A. M. Weaver wrote in the catalog accompanying the exhibit.

Each artist, in his own way, alerted viewers to concepts and processes that bring together mathematics, art, and nature. Mathematics itself offers a multifaceted, solid frame on which to hang provocative creations of artistic imagination.

Originally posted November 20, 2006