Curated by Ellen K. Levy

From Forces to Forms

February 1 - April 27, 2022  

Pratt Manhattan Gallery


From Forces to Forms is curated by Ellen K. Levy and marks the inaugural exhibition of Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery, which is directed by Nick Battis.  Levy, a multimedia artist, scholar, and past president of the College Art Association, gives center stage to little-explored dimensions of form generation, including the roles of agency, contingency, and physico-chemical forces. The artists collaborate with matter, creating art that intimates the interconnectedness of the world and its dependencies. From Forces to Forms explores the nature of form by engaging with the potent forces and processes of nature. By investigating how physical laws shape living and nonliving forms alike — ideas first proposed by D’Arcy Thompson in his classic tome On Growth and Form (1917) — the exhibition explores universal principles of organismic development while delving into the flux and perturbations that characterize life today.  

Reflecting Pratt Institute’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, From Forces to Forms features works by 19 artists and designers whose practices draw from both art and science and articulate a shared commitment to creating a more sustainable world. These works consider the implications of form generation through a variety of media (from analog to digital), at different scales (from subatomic to macroscopic), and in varied contexts (from prebiotic to ecosystems). 

Questions raised by the curator Ellen Levy — “How do artists tap powerful yet unseen forces through emergence? What patterns of nature might new technologies help us to visualize? How might artists intersect the virtual and real worlds in ways that illuminate both? Can art help us affect needed environmental change through identifying patterns of behavior? How can art address the quantum world?”

MARK YOUR CALENDAR:

4/2: Laws of Nature

The first section of Pratt’s exhibition, From Forces to Forms, is comprised of works by artists who explore basic forces of nature and the behavior of entities that are often placed, unattended, in the background. The artists foreground the activation of life, often constructing their own methods. Like Thompson, they look at the intersection of physics and chemistry, probing the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, and they consider the available sources of energy to initiate this transition. 

ARTISTS:

Adam Brown and Robert Root-Bernstein explore the prebiotic world in their collaborative artwork, ReBioGeneSys (2021), based on Miller’s and Urey’s pivotal 1953 origin of life experiment. 

Paul Thomas invents ways he might visualize probabilities of position and speed that characterize uncertainty in the quantum world. 

Todd Siler visualizes forces of energy in his drawing, Mapping Magnetic Domains of the Fractal Reactor (2006), applying principles of fractal geometry to plasma physics. 

Tauba Auerbach often engages principles of pattern formation. The works from Heat Current (2020) serve as mysterious tracers of movements created by temperature differences.

Meredith Tromble interprets the force of photosynthesis, creating a video that combines dance and drawing in an imaginative encounter with this force.

4/9: Morphogenesis and Self-Organization

The artworks in the second section have strong affinities with processes analyzed in Thompson’s On Growth and Form. Several artists in this group appropriate the generative potential of nature. They set the conditions for shaping and self-organization to occur, exploiting a program of behavior built into the materials that creates flows, rhythms, and movements. Other artists in this section approach morphogenesis metaphorically. The foundation of complexity science is revealed in both groups: simple manipulations can cause complex results.


ARTISTS:

William Lamson brings geologic forces into the gallery, allowing them to develop over the duration of the show.

Haresh Lalvani collaborates with metal fabricator Milgo/Bufkin. He activates physical emergence within matter and then applies forces to create elegant seamless topological surfaces.

Janet Echelman creates deformed grids on an architectural scale that create topological transformations suggestive of organismic development.

Gemma Anderson has devised a playful way to relate species that would otherwise be considered unconnected, creating aesthetically arresting work that is both logical yet surreal. 

Oliver Laric features the unpredictable morphing of a black line drawn on a white ground that evokes processes of cell mitosis in his animation, Betweenness (2005).

Ricci Albenda explores the emergence of organic forms in topological investigations that then materialize optical and perspectival phenomena. 

4/16: Repairing Nature