Boolean Valley
March 13 – June 6, 2010
This spring, the Nasher Sculpture Center will present in its garden a unique installation exploring the intersection between architectural precision and handmade craft. Boolean Valley, the result of collaboration between potter Adam Silverman and architect Nader Tehrani, subjects the intuitive and tactile process of ceramics to the stringency of Boolean logic. Named after mathematician George Boole, Boolean logic rationalizes the intersection of two or multiple sets. Today, it is most often used to narrow internet searches, but is also employed in architecture and design as an operation in digital modeling to add or subtract from volumes, thereby creating new forms. The artists use Boolean logic to determine the shape and configuration of nearly 400 cut clay objects, creating a topographic landscape within the space of the museum.
The installation of the objects changes according the parameters of the space in which they will be displayed. At the Nasher Sculpture Center, the artists will adapt the configuration to one of the ponds at the end of the garden. The surface of the water acts as a transparent plane intersecting the conical and domed shapes fired cobalt blue or charcoal black with distinctive craters and bumps from the silicon carbide in the glaze. Plunging into, rising from, or just skimming the top of the water, the arrangement of the ceramic forms produces an effect that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Boolean Valley was commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center through the 2009 arts initiative AGENCY: The Work of Artists, organized by guest curator Julie Lazar.
The initiative was funded in part by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, Nimoy Foundation, and gifts from Mickie and Gibson Anderson, Jo and Barry Ariko, L.J. Cella, Wanda Kownacki and John Holton, Sally and Don Lucas, Judy and George Marcus, Kathie and Robert Maxfield, and Fred Nicholas.