The Technological Sublime
Stanford Art Spaces is
pleased to announce its March-April 2015 art exhibit, featuring drawings,
sculptures and digital prints by Theodora Varnay Jones of San Francisco in Resonances, and digital prints by Penny
Olson of Vallejo in Photonics (i.e.,
the science of light transmission through lasers, fiber optics, etc.)
Both are respected
mid-career artists who work with materials and processes in a mode analogous to
scientific experimentation, i.e., open-ended and empirical, without a priori conclusions or the aim of direct
self-expression, but instead an interest in exploring the material and methods.
Varnay Jones and Olson are thus a good fit for SAS science/engineering venues.
Incidentally, the artists took a tour of the Nanotechnology labs in 2014 and
took away discarded silicon wafers, which they have reused, repurposed and
recycled to create new bodies of work: Jones’ two assemblage quartets, Analogy I-IV and Analogy 1-4; and Olson’s Wafer
inkjet prints, digital interpretations and expansions of the color and
structure of the high-tech found objects.
While both artists take
their general approach from science, or at least its methodological cousin in
art, minimalism, which rejected Abstract Expressionism’s macho glorification of
emotion, but naturally, in time, began to look grandiose, taciturn and even
corporate, they transcend the Spartan rigor of that movement by imbuing its
abstract, non-metaphorical framework with philosophical and environmental
concerns. The scholar David Nye coined the term, “the technological sublime,”
to speak of Americans’ justifiable feelings of awe before engineered
achievements like the Empire State Building and Boulder Dam, (the cultural
equivalents of the natural scenery worshiped by the Romantics). The science
fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke declared, “Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Varnay
Jones and Olson adopt the processes and procedures of scientific inquiry but
make of it something magical.
Varnay Jones’ ideas
derive from her materials, and her predilection for systems, but they go beyond
formalism. Her ‘drawings’ on paper mounted on wooden supports—Indistinction #4 A, Indistinction #4 B, 9.23-9.29’98,
resemble charts or matrices, with dots and color bars organizing the data; but
her palette, craftsmanship and sense to tactility (probably related to her
printmaking expertise) transform them into something more: philosophical game
boards, perhaps. Her constructions of stretched translucent fabric stretched
over wooden armatures—Transparency #17,
Transparency #26—contain both space
and, because the layers through which we peer suggest sky and water, and change
as we move around them in time. (The artist Robin Hill called them “containers
for experience.” A pair of wall-hanging sculptures fashioned from discards from
the pharmaceutical company Novartis—Novartis
2, Novartis 4—suggests vents and
filters, but also human hives or animal nests—high-tech versions of Joseph
Cornell’s Dovecotes. www.TheodoraVarnayJones.com.
Olson’s
approach is more photographic, but certainly not in a traditional way/ Her Streambed series of cyanotypes
(blueprints, in plain terms) from the early 1990s arose from her collaboration
with a UCLA earth scientist who had made a model of a pebble-covered streambed,
studying its hydrodynamics using a stereoscopic camera. Olson used a pair of
the 3D negatives but aligned them out of their parallax positions, out of
registration, when she exposed her photosensitized treated papers to the sun,
creating diverse (and unreal) underwater topographies. Her 2014 series of panoramic phone-camera prints,
Glen Cove, traces the artist’s shadow
as she hiked above the Carquinez Strait, and the sunset progressively altering
the colors of the rocks and rubble of the trail. Finally, her Wafer series transforms the discarded
silicon wafers from the Center for Integrated Systems through a number of
operations into something like icons—symmetrical, glowing and mysterious
“ghosts in the machine.” San Francisco Chronicle Art Critic
Kenneth Baker wrote, ”Olson’s pieces
... achieve a sort of ringing silence such as we might imagine belonging to
light itself.” www.PennyOlson.com.
The shows continue
through May 1. There will be a reception
for the artists on Thursday, March 26, from 4:30 to 7:00pm, in the Center for Integrated
Systems in the Paul G. Allen Building. The adjacent Packard Electrical
Engineering Building will also be open — as will the nearby Cantor Arts Center
and Anderson Collection (until 8pm—free admission). Please see Facebook.com/Stanford
Art Spaces for directions and updates. Parking at all university lots and
structures is free after 4:00.
