Curatorial Statement
Geometry’s mathematical foundation provides a false sense of certainty in its ability to measure the world we know and recreate with precision three dimensional objects and spaces on a two dimensional plane. As there is much that we can’t see, understand, or know, and even more to be intuited and imagined, artists have long approached geometry less as a set of rules than a lens to be explored.
From the tiled constellations of 6th century Islamic architecture, where repeating forms are thought conjure spiritual connection and provide a greater understanding of reality, to the Renaissance conviction that the world could be ordered through mathematical logics—articulated by Leon Battista Alberti’s treatises on art, architecture, and perspective and embodied in works such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—geometry has served as a bridge between vision and structure in an attempt at understanding the physical world. Modernism initiated a more intuitive and investigative use of geometry. The bold graphic designs of Russian Constructivism aimed to reflect industrial society and the built environment; the meditative compositions of Joseph Albers and Agnes Martin employed grids, planes, and color to express not only an external environment but an internal, emotional experience; and the seriality of Minimalism’s art objects sought to make viewers more attuned to their phenomenological relationships with space. These varied approaches suggest that shape is not a fixed system but a tool and a language that can articulate mathematical principles as much as it can convey ideas, emotions, and experiences.
Geometry: The Shape of Things gathers artists who engage this lineage not as prescriptive but as generative—a method by which to comment on art history, better understand the world, and imagine new relationships to space and perception.
About the Juror
Hannah Sage Kay is an arts writer and critic based between New York and Los Angeles. She studied art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Bard College, and has contributed to such publications as Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Autre, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Financial Times, The Guardian, and Los Angeles Review of Books, amongst others.
Jolie Hossack / Stephen Scrivener / Craig Wood / Tom Hecht / André Brik / Ori Aviram / Veronica Primerano / Meg Cook / William Waggoner / Joe Arts / Gregg Chann / Ginnie Gardiner
In this section, artists take greater liberties, playing with unconventional materials, bold colors, and sculptural forms, such that their works possess a lightheartedness and joyous exuberance.
Material experimentation is exemplified by the work of Jolie Hossack, who combines discarded materials and adorns them with bold patterns, and Stephen Scrivener who similarly deconstructs cardboard boxes to use as canvases, on which he paints gridded patterns in semi-monochromatic palettes inspired by Suprematism, De Stijl, and Op Art.
Artists working in sculpture or three-dimensions similarly employ unusual materials. Craig Wood creates pyramidal ceramic structures that stand on short legs or wheels and possess a rather anthropomorphized, cheerful character. Tom Hecht also ventures into sculpture with his semi-soft wall works—comprised of stitched fabric and stuffed forms that are arranged to recall the layout of tennis, basketball, soccer and other courts—whereas André Brik takes quotidian objects, in this case a chair, and deconstructs their shapes and colors into graphic compositions.
Others like Ori Aviram, Veronica Primerano, Meg Cook and William Waggoner employ geometry more directly. While Premerano turns to the grid as a protective structure that organizes color while offering psychological clarity in uncertain times, Waggoner evokes the unrealized technological optimism of the late twentieth century through circuit-like abstractions that recall signals, codes, and imagined futures.
Finally, Joe Arts, Gregg Chann, and Ginnie Gardiner all move between non-objective abstraction and subtle references to nature or architecture, allowing form and color to suggest possible perspectives and environments without dictating any fixed reading.
