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In Congruity
Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery "In Congruity," the current exhibition at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, is an offering of new mixed media paintings on wood by Lynda Lowe. It is as much a celebration of human curiosity, ingenuity and discovery as it is a visual pleasure. "In Congruity" will intrigue and challenge through May 27, 2000. "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." That declaration by physicist, Arthur Stanley Eddington, sums much of the reality behind the equations and conjectures of Quantum physics. Light, as just one example, behaves as a wave... or a particle, a quantum -- it all depends upon the expectation, the observational approach. In a similar way, the facts and theories of science, and the Truths of the Arts, like the Truths of religious insight, are complementary views of a unity... and we require both. Lynda Lowe's art does not so much employ or embody the scientific phenomena and facts, as it views and contemplates, iconifies them aesthetically. Her themes are not science as applied in or to art, nor scientific illustration, nor even specific disciplines in themselves. They are a rare genre -- the artist contemplating the human soul as fabricating its science, a science which at times seduces the soul to deny itself. Her art assumes that mind and soul form a duality of one: they are "In Congruity."
It is surprising how, until the 1960s, so many great thinkers, and particularly physicists, were also well-versed in literature, philosophy, art and, especially, music. They acknowledged their humanity, and it may well shed some light on their own creativity in the sciences. Since the Eighteenth century, it has been far rarer that artists were truly aware of, much less amenable to the sciences. Physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington, in his essay "Mind Stuff" mused on "the generation and maintenance of waves against viscosity, by suitable forces applied to the surface," (he gave complex equations); and his thoughts wandered to, "There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter/ And lit by the rich skies...," (Eddington quotes in length). (In Quantum Questions, New Science Library: 1984). This is a central pulse to Lynda Lowe's art. And it is important and moving for the reasons Eddington himself declared: "It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, is also the only guarantor of reality that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion. Illusion is to reality as the smoke is to fire." Particle and wave, Flesh and Spirit, science and art -- "In Congruity." Lynda Lowe's exhibition at the Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery offers an early panel, one of the beginnings to her "Origin" series of paintings. Appropriately, it is entitled Big Bang. In this work, there is still a sense of concept realized in image, a direct correspondence between cosmology and an artist's conception. It is nonetheless a stimulating, visually engaging work. This exhibition at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery also includes Origin: Gravity (18"x24": Mixed Media), which reveals a further level of insight. In this work, Lowe does not just envision, but expands and investigates the process of what the resulting vision is, and how one comes to envision. This is not just a playing-with-image. Albert Einstein himself firstly saw visions and only then sought their notation -- and he once noted: "God is subtle; He is not malicious." In an excellent preface to the NIU Art Museum catalogue for Lowe's 1999 exhibition, "Form and Measure," artist and art critic Ann Wiens noted: "...the questioning and problem-solving processes are more intriguing to her than the ultimate results of the quest." It is what makes us human; artists and scientists alike.
Themes in Lowe's art, as in nature, mutate and reappear in alternative guises. Book of Commons #1 (18"x24": watercolor/oil on wood), the first in her new series, reveals a plumb bob (upper right) juxtaposed with bird wing schematics (at left). It is the artist who intuits the necessary contrast, and the congruity: an act, to be an act, must rely on an opposing ground. The gravity which draws the plumb bob true, is the very force which enables flight. The motif here was presaged in Momentum and Gravity (1999). In Lynda Lowe's art the formal qualities of composition and technique seem so natural to an immediate impression -- they move a viewer and the very intensity of the artist's own interest contributes to the enduring interest of her work. Lowe noted at the opening of this exhibition that the book holds a particular pride of place in the formulation and transmission of discovery and belief. It has for centuries allowed men to recall and know, to speak beyond their own time to the future. Lowe's Book of Commons series, showcased in the Gwenda Jay/Addington exhibition, reverberates to that transmission. The paintings in the Book of Commons set echo the codex format as a means of framing image, and of contrasting harmonies of motif, and the artist develops the theme as a flexible, platonic ideal. This visual trope takes imaginative flight in pieces such as the watercolor/oil on wood, Book of Commons #5 (18"x24"), which confronts the viewer with a double spine and a doubled, split panel at right, balanced against a sign, numbers, at left. In Book of Commons #7 (18"x24") the book similacrum is rotated by ninety degrees, and here, in its visual elements, contrasts are postulated and resolved. A viewer notes the maple seed at lower left; two pebbles at the top of an inner panel, and a lone helix crowned with an arrow -- a directionality implicit in living matter -- and these stand in seeming contrast to the five inert but ordered pebbles at lower right. Lowe at times extends the book's linear enclosure of content to a broader approach. In works such as Form and Measurement #2 (26"x36") objects of calibration and measure are contained within square contours; segregated from the ground panel which itself bears at lower right a triple bar ensemble similar to map codes: bar codes in surveyor's units. In Extremis (36"x28") a drilled rock pendant is suspended from beyond the image's uppermost boundary by a cord marked in black and yellow units of length. It hovers quiescent above a branch of thorns which rises above four rows of stones, arranged from four rocks in the upper line down to five small pebbles in the lowest. To the right of these is a small, unitized bar line. Lowe noted at the opening that in such pieces, the initial image seemed too condensed and compact; but the effect of embedding the smaller panels is to transform them into apparent incidences within a greater totality. It gives the sense that science, like art, ever draws out and constrains that which has infinite extension and potential. As with wave and quantum particle in light phenomenon, they contrast and at the same time harmonize matter, animate and inanimate. What eludes the materiality is precisely what informs the artist's intimations, and, upon close reflection, it is what constitutes the grounding for science, art, and all that is uniquely human. Some art lovers will, perhaps exceptionally, recognize in Lowe's paintings old friends from the history of science and human accomplishment. In Book of Commons #10 (18"x24") one notes at lower left Descartes' Vortices of Force -- his speculation of 1744 as to the fundamental structures that frame the universe; and these are linked at upper left with a white circle interlinked with red triangle, while at lower right a wishbone is evident. Three pebbles at upper right complete the panel. Always, in life and non-life, man perceives (as Plato thought), or imagines (as per Aristotle), structures, archetypes, underlying rationales. In genetics, as in Chaos theory, and cosmologies, nothing is truly random... dissimilarities, apparent incongruities, small unrelated seeds evolve and resolve into wholes not summed by their parts and into ordered complexities, symmetric or not. Descartes (in math), Einstein (in physics), Crick and Watson (DNA), Kukele (the bonded ring of hydrocarbon chemistry)... all thought in images; the math and diagrams came as afterthought. There is a poetry in such intuitions, imagings. Linda Lowe's paintings, the artist's informed inspiration, reveal that it is also the stuff of art. Viewers needn't be conversant with science or philosophy; in fact, that might even distract from a deep surrender to Lowe's real inspiration. In a work such as Book of Commons #11 (18"x24"), the knowledgeable may indeed recognize her incorporations from Galileo's The Siderial Messenger of 1610, in which Galileo announced the moons of Jupiter, dethroning the Earth's believed unique status; and in which he also ferreted out the rings of Saturn. But Galileo at first doubted his eyes: and then, glance by glance, connected two apparent and unholy satellites into that planet's singular ring. It is the ability to perceive, not the resulting data, that Book of Commons #11 finds as its theme; an inspiration made more explicit by the germs of life -- acorns, maple seed, red beans -- which counterpoint the Galilean florescence of mind. In Book of Commons #11, Saturn bears rings; seeds sport wings, and both reveal a growth toward form. Lynda Lowe displays a meditative and romantic art, born of an uncommon meditation. Perpetuum (36"x28"), another watercolor and oil on wood, confirms that Lynda Lowe's art does not draw inspiration solely from hard science: her sense of wonder and empathy ranges through the humane and social. In Perpetuum, a viewer first discerns abstract writing forms (there is a source), and then alien, but recognizable characters of script. There is a progression... from the concept of marks, marks linked to meaning, to alphabets. It is both a conceptual leap (and needn't have occurred, as shown by many pictographic and ideographic writings of the world) and the result of visual play and curiosity. The child begins by taking note of all about it; the artist sustains that child-like need to see, investigate, explore... to develop and become. Lynda Lowe noted that the writing forms incised into her panel originated with Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel, a teacher-philosopher who believed all learning should be extracted from nature and observation, that it should challenge the mind. Pestalozzi did this in practice; Froebel articulated it in such books as The Education of Man (A.M. Kelly: 1974 reprint of 1900 Edition). Among other things, Froebel devised his characters as a challenge to teach children writing, as something to be investigated, much like children would investigate the snail spiral below these markings or the longhorn beetle at the bottom of Perpetuum. (Froebel's methods nurtured the children: Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky....) In Lynda Lowe's art, one needn't know the wellsprings; the paintings offer the essentials, in forms and archetypes, in harmonies, in their congruities. In the 1999 NIU Art Museum catalogue to Lowe's "Form and Measure" exhibit, artist and critic, Ann Wiens, concluded: "Lynda Lowe's paintings are explorations of the points at which processes of artistic and scientific investigation merge." Wiens also summarized the import of Lowe's poetic image: "Without intuition and subjectivity, science is doomed to repeat itself indefinitely, to stagnate. Art without the deliberate, focused pursuit of an intellectually defined concept will suffer the same fate." Scientists have noted that as well as artists:
Lynda Lowe's art rediscovers faith by unveiling part of the fallacy of isolated fact: her art emerges in that congruity, Eddington's assertion that "reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion": her art is curative. Physicist Erwin Schroedinger, in his "Why Not Talk Physics?" once observed: "Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears." And Eddington pointed out that science can explain the joke, but it cannot make you laugh. (Both in Quantum Questions, New Science Library: 1984) "In Congruity" is the stalking of strange footprints, and together, the paintings gather a reflective image of their musical, laughing, artistic... inquiring and creative source. It is a scientist who caught the profound insight:
"In Congruity," the current exhibition of art by Lynda Lowe offers twelve celebrations of human curiosity, ingenuity and discovery -- human spirit captured in paint on wood -- a visual pleasure. "In Congruity" now at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, runs through May 27, 2000. The gallery's website is http://www.gwendajay.com. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editor's Note: Many of the books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews are in print and may be ordered through this magazine's Barnes & Noble link. Quantum Questions (New Science Library:1984) is an anthology of noted physicists on transcendent questions. Of related interest is Modern Art and Modern Science by Paul C. Vitz and Arnold B. Glimcher ((Praeger: 1984), a philosophical treatment of science and art. Einstein's Space & Van Gogh's Sky: Physical Reality and Beyond by Lawrence Leshan & Henry Margenau (MacMillan: 1982) and The Emperor's New Mind by physicist Roger (Oxford: 1990) are highly recommended. |
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