- June 1, 2026, 12:30 pm US/Central
On Display June 5- August 26
Reception Wednesday June 17th 3:30- 5:00pm
Mathematics has had a profound effect in shaping modern art: not in its ability to generate attractive patterns but in exposing the artists to spatial possibilities not easily observed in their physical world. Math had become intrinsic to my work. Constant experimenting with intriguing concepts has produced essays, conference presentations and journal papers on applying these to sculpture practice. Among these ideas were super-spheres, minimal surfaces, tiling on a sphere and employing artificial life algorithms in modular sculpture.
Math is most embedded in the current color prints, although often least apparent. Digging deep into fractals, usually several billion levels down, I mine nooks and crannies where the symmetries that characterize fractals have broken down. This is in order to extract unusual shape relationships to which I apply the visual elements of painting hoping to evoke unique poetic sensations. Such a set of relations is not easy to locate. It takes several dozen extractions to find one eligible to become an artwork.
A second layer of geometry emerges in the fractal program’s method of rendering. This method is old, as the program was scripted 35 years ago. It subdivides the surfaces into patches of color defined with spline curves, and then blends between adjacent patches to smooth out the rendering. A photo program works to separate the patches into shapes that become part of the image for further editing.
– Stephen Luecking
Free and open to the public