The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics (SCGP) presents artwork by mathematician Moira Chas, industrial designer Johnathan Hopp and artist duo LoVid from September 30 through December 7 at the Simons Center Gallery. The Opening Reception will be held on Friday, September 30, at 5 pm.
“Ways of Making: A Dialogue about Processes with Moira Chas, Johnathan Hopp, and LoVid” shares three distinct methodologies with intricate processes and ideas by artists that bring diverse backgrounds into their practice. They are informed by varied disciplines and means, including mathematics and design, pattern and process, digital and handmade — each creating work that resonates with conceptual authenticity and innovation.
The exhibition, curated by Tali Hinkis and Lorraine Walsh, is a place for dialogue, and visitors are welcome to reflect on potential connections while raising timeless questions for meaningful consideration — What is art? What is design? What is the difference between visual mathematical representation and inspiration? And why do we love knots?
Admission is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 am to 4 pm. For more information visit the website or contact gallery@scgp.stonybrook.edu.
About the Artists
Moira Chas’ work is a handmade invitation to the math world, addressed to people of all ages and levels of knowledge, from children to experts. Chas’ hope is that by interacting with her pieces, discussing, or thinking about their properties, the public will be led one step closer to understanding mathematical ideas. As part of a continuum that includes her writing, math research and teaching — she is a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University — her artifacts combine yarn and wire, cloth and zippers, to illustrate or suggest mathematical objects, questions or theorems. The techniques are basic: the simplest stitches of crochet and sewing including, in her most recent productions, the wire looping technique of Ruth Asawa. A single elementary process is repeated many, many times until the multiple iterations form something new. Mathematics abstracts something about the world around us. Chas strives to make some of these abstractions more tangible, bringing them back in this way to the world around us.
Johnathan Hopp is an industrial designer working predominantly in ceramics, with a hands-on research and making approach. His practice brings together methods and modes of work from various making disciplines to investigate new possibilities for production and objects. Objects are an archive of the accumulated processes and marks by which they are made. Software, printmaking, 3D printing, extrusion and slip casting are all participants in the making of Hopp’s objects, leaving their marks in the final product. Hopp uses a mix of traditional mass production, craft and digital techniques as he strives to expand and elaborate on the range of ceramic objects. The inventive work is an outcome of design and production workflows intended to challenge and maximize the forms and languages incorporated in the process. Hopp is an assistant professor of design at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.
New York–based artist duo LoVid have worked together since 2001. LoVid’s work centers around the juxtaposition of media and material, physicality and virtuality, moving image, and craft. Their collaborative practice incorporates a wide range of techniques and processes, from DIY electrical engineering to textile design and stained glass. Throughout multiple projects, LoVid maintains a signature visual and sonic aesthetic of color, pattern and texture density — all incorporating glitch and noise into decor. Their process navigating between the handmade and the machine-produced highlights the challenges and possibilities of the networked era in which we live, particularly a sense of the world that intermixes virtual and physical, materials and simulations, fantasy and reality, hope and despair, connectivity and isolation.
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