Category: MOLECULAR

Conversion

Emily Nachison.

My artwork explores the human perception of nature and transformation. Mythology, scientific history and New-Age idealism become starting points for an investigation into the cultural creation of landscape.

This series of work, titled Conversion, investigates the transformation of matter. Both installations, Hall of Conversion and Crystalline Conversion are comprised of suspended glass apothecary dishes. Each dish balances a cast glass sculptural piece that shares the exact same weight and volume as the rest. The glass pieces shape shift from one form to the next, illustrating natural cycles of growth and decay, while retaining the same volumetric proportion. This work serves as a reflection of our ever-changing, yet never dying, world. Our world is one of transformation and not destruction.

Molecular Texts

David Abel. Zetaqop Ladder (for Alison Knowles) and Molecular Text #2: Solids were created for the 2011 exhibition Object Poems at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

The processes under development and on display in these works can be taken in many ways. Two approaches that seem especially apt to point out: an intervention in the rules governing the representation of a text by constituent parts; and a concretization of the figurative character of writing, a literalization of the nonliteral. Here I’m taking my senses of “figurative” and “literal” from Owen Barfield’s Speaker’s Meaning (Wesleyan, 1967):

Particulate Matter

Rachael Wren.

My paintings use geometry to structure ephemeral atmospheric and natural phenomena. I am intrigued by moments in nature when air has a tangible presence, almost becoming visible — fog playing between tree branches, light peeking through clouds, the darkening sky before a thunderstorm. At these times, form and space seem to mingle; edges disappear and atmosphere becomes all-encompassing. To reproduce this sensation of dense, particulate space, I work with an accumulation of small, repeated brush marks of subtly shifting color. These individual marks echo the fundamental particles that compose all matter. They hover, shimmer, and vibrate between the crisp lines of an anchoring grid, an interplay that suggests the universal duality between structure and randomness, order and chaos, the known and the unknown.

Molecular

Bruce Pollock.

Complex things are made of basic elements. In nature, biological organisms are built from cells, mountains from rocks, rocks from molecules, and molecules from atoms, ad infinitum. The complex digitalized image that you are looking at as you read this is composed of tiny pixels of light.

As new technologies are devised to scientifically look into the structure of nature, new spaces have emerged. A body once deemed solid and impenetrable can now be electronically scanned to reveal a cancerous cell. Oil deposits can be located deep in the earth by using hydrophones or seismometers. And we can peer through the cloud cover on distant planets with radio telescopes. Our present era is marked by the exploration of spaces great and small beyond the scope of our normal vision.