There is something compelling about art that works with a limited visual vocabulary. A line, a shape, a repeated object, a grid or a simple arrangement can hold our attention without needing to tell us exactly what we are looking at or what we should think about it.
The works in Geometry are very different in material and intention, but they share a strong graphic quality. Shape, repetition, contrast, pattern and space do much of the work. Some are physically minimal, while others contain hundreds of individual elements. What connects them is not necessarily Minimalism as an art movement, but something closer to a graphic way of seeing: reducing things to basic visual elements and discovering how much those elements can do.
Betty Kaser’s GR1 appears at first to be an exercise in straightforward geometry. Triangular, rectangular and square forms are assembled into a tall columnar sculpture. The shapes are simple and the contrasts clear. But Kaser describes these pieces as “a sort of sculptural collage,” and the word collage is useful. The composition changes as we move around it. Forms overlap and separate, edges line up and then disappear, and lines change direction. There is no single correct view. The sculpture continually redraws itself as the viewer moves around it.
Francesca Vivenza also begins with very basic elements: words, lines and the familiar outline of a house. In Building Project, CASA, HOME and HOUSE become almost graphic symbols. A triangle is enough to suggest a roof; a horizontal line can define or divide a space. The images seem remarkably simple, but the idea of “home” behind them is anything but. Vivenza’s practice questions the stability of things we often take for granted, including home, nation and native language.
That uncertainty becomes physical in House Drooping, House Interrupted and X House Vivenza uses brightly coloured flagging tape, the kind tied to branches to mark a route through the Canadian wilderness. She was attracted to its association with finding one’s way, and ultimately finding one’s way home. Pulled tight, the tape creates a neat, controlled line. Released, it collapses into a messy coil.
That transformation is almost a perfect visual description of what happens in the work. The reassuring geometry of the house begins to sag, break apart and become obscured. A symbol we recognize instantly becomes uncertain. The works do not need to illustrate disorientation; instead, they make a familiar shape behave in an unfamiliar way.
Yvonne Singer uses another of the most basic devices in graphic composition: the grid. Rows of small black forms are organized into a larger, orderly field. From a distance there is repetition and regularity. Look more closely and that uniformity begins to disappear.
The forms began as handmade black clay coils or knots, and each is individually different. Singer photographs them and digitally prints the resulting images, bringing the irregularity of a handmade object into the more controlled world of technological reproduction. The grid does not erase the differences between the objects. It actually makes us notice them. Because everything has been placed within the same visual system, our eyes begin comparing one form with the next. We see both the collective pattern and the individual at the same time.
Stephen Boyd takes the idea of systems, repetition and variation into the digital realm. Boyd has been creating generative art since 2003, working with code, rules, randomness and the deliberate surrender of some control over the finished image. For Boyd, the system that produces the work is part of the artwork itself.
This introduces an interesting question into an exhibition concerned with geometry. What happens when an artist does not position every line or shape, but instead creates the rules that determine how those elements will behave?
In Boyd’s EVERYTHIIING, photographs are deconstructed and then reassembled according to overlapping patterns based on cellular automata systems. The source image remains present, but it has been reorganized into something that hovers between photography and abstraction. Boyd describes the underlying principle very simply: repeated rules can lead to surprising results.
His Binary Trees similarly brings to mind the ability of a simple system to produce an increasingly complex visual structure. Branching is one of the clearest examples of geometry created through repetition: one form divides, those divisions divide again, and a complicated structure can grow from a relatively simple starting point. Here, graphic form is not simply arranged; it is generated.
Justin Mezzapelli’s Bread Tag Triptych arrives at complexity by a much more physical and everyday route. Bread tags are objects we barely notice. They are useful for a short period of time and then generally discarded. Mezzapelli’s wider practice deliberately pays attention to these kinds of mundane and overlooked things, and to what can happen when we spend time with them.
Accumulated and arranged in large numbers, the bread tags begin to lose their everyday identity. Reds, greens, yellows, purples and whites become blocks of colour. Their repeated outlines create rhythm. Rows become patterns, while mirrored arrangements produce larger symmetrical forms. From a distance, the individual bread tag almost disappears into the composition.
But it never disappears completely. Mezzapelli describes patience and the passage of time as important parts of his practice, and the accumulation itself becomes evidence of that time. These are not simply coloured shapes selected from a palette. They are ordinary things that have been noticed, collected, kept and brought together. Something insignificant becomes significant through attention and repetition.
That movement between a simple element and a more complex whole runs through all five artists in Geometry. Kaser assembles basic geometric forms into sculptures that change as we move around them. Vivenza takes the familiar lines of a house and makes them unstable. Singer uses the regularity of a grid to reveal the differences between individual handmade forms. Boyd creates rules and systems from which unexpected visual structures can emerge. Mezzapelli accumulates ordinary objects until bread tags become colour, rhythm and pattern.
In each case there is something we can grasp quite quickly: a column, a house, a grid, a branching system, a repeated shape. And then the work complicates it.
Perhaps that is why simple visual language can be so effective. Reducing an artwork to line, shape, repetition, contrast, pattern or a set of rules does not necessarily reduce what it can say. Sometimes the opposite happens. With less visual noise, small differences become important. A bent line matters. An irregular shape stands out. A repeated instruction produces something unexpected. An ordinary object becomes strange simply because we have been asked to look at it differently.
These works remind us that simplicity is not the absence of complexity. Sometimes it is the means by which complexity is created, and the means by which we begin to see it.
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