If the stars make patterns, can our scripts unfold forever? curated by Emily Butler

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Amber Frid-Jimenez, “Untitled (tree diagram),” 2009

archival inkjet on Hahnemuhle, 27" x 27" inches (courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18, 1 - 4pm

Tania Candiani, Genevieve De Leon, Diagonal Press, Amber Frid-Jimenez

‘When everything is on fire… we need an altered gaze.’ - Genevieve De Leon 

From stargazing to crypto trading, humans have long sought to make sense of the world by mapping patterns of nature and building their own knowledge systems. In an era when everything gets converted into code and binary thinking pervades, the artists in this show invite us to reimagine our frameworks. They encourage us to gaze through black mirrors or to trace the rings of recursive writing, offering new perspectives on the complexities of the universe.

The exhibition foregrounds ancestral and alternative forms of knowledge - creation myths, calendar keeping, and the processes of craft - shifting the focus from linear progress to cyclicality. Through evocative visual and sensory approaches, the artists explore notions of circular time, recursion, and infinity. Even as artificial intelligence promises to surpass the human mind, the question remains: are we any closer to understanding the cosmos?

Numbers and alphabets are two of humankind’s earliest generative systems. Since her time at MIT, Amber Frid-Jimenez has experimented with and tested the limits of algorithms, exploring their potentials and limitations. In her series of works Untitled (tree diagram) (2009) she creates an unsupervised model based on clustering to translate the recursive semantic structures of James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake (1939) into intricate drawings. The resulting branched, circular formations echo both Joyces’ complex writing and the concentric growth patterns found in the rings of a tree. Finnegan’s Wake is based on a cyclical model, as the novel’s last line for instance completes with its first one. Life cycles, a central theme in the story, are mirrored in Joyce’s prose, which Frid-Jimenez astutely visualises and reinterprets.  

Since their inception, mathematics and divination were closely entwined, as seen in masterworks from different belief systems across the globe, from the influential I-Ching to the striking Maya calendar. In their new series of works, omens of an indistinct future I, II, III (2024), Genevieve De Leon juxtaposes star charts made by puncturing paper with obsidian mirror viewing devices. Historically used for stargazing or scrying, De Leon’s black mirrored surfaces help alter our vision, inviting us to reflect on our own coordinates - including those of identity - amid an era of political polarization. In string studies for a new beginning I, II, III, IV (2024) De Leon reimagines star charts as potential alternatives to the constellations supposedly observed by Aztec emperor Moctezuma II prior to the fateful arrival of conquistador Hernán Cortés’ in Mexico.

Research into the Tovar Codex and the Codex Aubin, which inspired the series afterimages of history (2024), reveals that the rise of the Aztec Empire and the Spanish conquest of Central America was anything but a linear history.[1] Referencing the writings of Ariella Azoulay, De Leon considers imperialism as being persistent and cyclical.[2] In this work, De Leon reopens the space of historical foreclosure, playing with the possibilities of doubling and repetition to confront and release the trauma engendered by imperialism. Inspired by the traditions of flip books or hinged triptychs, viewers are invited to interact with the four works, allowing them to build their own narratives and beliefs.

Fascinated by the wisdom in the techniques of craft to elicit a material response and the process of learning through making, Tauba Auerbach refers to these accumulated knowledges as ‘technologies’. Moreover, the artist looks for the ‘edges of where systems cohere’, and in the process tests the limits of human comprehension. Through their publishing practice with Diagonal Press, they explore how typefaces, architectural details, poetry, and various forms of esoteric knowledge can visualise complex systems.

In Quantum Prelude (Preludio Cuanticó) (2022), Tania Candiani intertwines different paradigms for understanding life and scale, by bringing together knowledge from ancestral Indigenous worldviews with recent developments in quantum physics. Carefully scored and choreographed, Quantum Prelude gathers 64 musicians to perform a composition that expresses the fundamental arithmetic, geometric and harmonic principles of music according to the laws of physics - the theoretical organizing principle of nature and the cosmos. The work is the result of a collaboration between UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), and the artist in residence program at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

About the Curator Emily Butler

Emily Butler is a freelance curator and writer. She is a Curating PHD candidate at the University of Reading researching the topic of artists and curators as (mis)translators, as they work increasingly across borders, between languages, sign systems and cultures. Previously she was the 2024 Platform Talks program curator, Art Toronto; Curator, Conversations at Art Basel, 2021-2023; Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2010-2022. She held roles in the Visual Arts team at British Council, Antony Gormley Studio and the Centre Pompidou. She contributes to international publications and projects.