Creative Combinations at the Wisconsin Union Galleries
By Katie Vaughn
Interesting forms have taken over the Wisconsin Union Galleries.
Beautiful beings seem to twist, turn and grow before you in the Class of
1925 Gallery in the Memorial Union, and in the adjacent room, rebar has
transformed into a minimalist landscape in the Porter Butts Gallery.
In
Balls of Light and Columns of Smoke: Surfaces in Hyperbolic Crochet,
Ayelet Lindenstrauss Larsen and Gabriele Meyer showcase a stunning
application of math. The two mathematicians have created large- and
small-scale hyperbolic forms out of crochet.
In an exhibition statement, the artists explain that a hyperbolic plane
is a type of two-dimensional object in which every point looks like
every other point. But in these planes, “if you start looking at
concentric circles, their circumferences grow ‘too quickly.’” This
“extra” grows exponentially, resulting in wild ruffles and curls.
The forms occur naturally in some shells, algae and leaves, but Larsen
and Meyer create theirs by hand, in boldly hued and white yarn. Meyer
hangs her larger works from the ceiling, allowing them to turn and
interact within the space.
Larsen, in contrast, displays her tiny forms inside miniature
room-boxes, a clever way to play with scale. Though her pieces are
small, they feel otherwise. She writes: “when I hold them in the palm of
my hand they do not feel small. The explosive growth of their
boundaries gives them power, and the power reads as big.”
While one might expect an artistic examination of a mathematical form
to be carried out in a high-tech, computerized manner, the surprising
use of a traditional craft instead is a stirring and deeply satisfying
choice.
In the next room, Suzanne Torres explores the dualities of the modern world in
De-Constructed Environments.
Her “Solitary Skin” installation spans the gallery floor. The steely
rebar material and grid-like form reference cities, construction and
urban architecture, yet the organic shape resembles an undulating
landscape. Its sleek, almost skeletal shape abstracts and distills the
idea of the environment down to its essence.
In a statement about the exhibition, Torres writes: “My intention is to
devise an alternative landscape embedded in the dualities that
construct our habitats—the natural and artificial, the surreal and
intimate, the contrived and happenstance—by manipulating the language of
materials most commonly associated with our constructed settings and
mundane usage.”
By her hand, the combination of hard, human-made materials and a
free-flowing, natural form feels like a most accurate reflection of the
modern environment.
Both
De-Constructed Environments and
Balls of Light and Columns of Smoke run through October 29 at the Memorial Union. For more information, visit
union.wisc.edu.
