Kaleidoscope at Box Factory
Curated by Holly Holmes
Opening reception Friday September 11th, 5.30 - 7.30pm EST
Exhibition opens September 3rd and runs through October 11th
Box Factory for the Arts
1101 Broad Street, St. Joseph, MI 49085
Phone: 269.983.3688
Email: info@boxfactoryforthearts.org
"repetition lends a kaleidoscopic quality to the writing– and what is a kaleidoscope but a device to reassemble endlessly the same particles? As if anticipating modern quantum physics, his world model is that of an indeterminate universe of endless permutation and recombination."
James Grauerholz, “On William S. Burrough’s Interzone,” pub. Die Welt, 1990
“A Cube is a Rectangle / Ein Würfel ist ein Rechteck” is an ongoing series of drawings I started in the summer of 2022. The arc of this project began in 1999 with the invention of an unfolding box sculpture that opens to reveal a pyramid at its center and unfurling polyhedric modules like the petals of a flower. The drawings in the series show the closed state of this box sculpture. Colloquially I refer to each drawing as a Würfel which is the German word for cube.
All the Würfels from this series are hand drawn on Bristol Vellum 270 gsm in ink and acrylic and cut to 5.5”H by 4.25” W. The drawings begin with a matrix of 16 rectangles arranged in a grid format. Each rectangle is bisected into triangles alternating from top left to bottom right and top right to bottom left. From this matrix an “isometric cube” (aka a hexagon) can be produced by drawing lines between the quarter points on each vertical side and center points on each horizontal side. A pyramid is then projected from the base of the cube to the center of the top face. At the corners four square towers span the height of the cube. The width and depth of each tower is approximately one eighth the overall height of the cube. Finally I “subtracted” the pyramid and towers from the cube to imagine four polyhedric modules. In the sculpture these modules rotate 90 degrees from perpendicular to the cube. Then they rotate a further 90 degrees to stand upright.
At times I render these modules as opaque, occluding the internal logic of the form but more often than not I imagine them in different material states. Maybe a drawing leans towards the diaphanous and the immaterial, in others it becomes about tessellation and topology. Some Würfels annihilate the Platonic solids and others celebrate them with unambiguous form. Cut-up techniques and generative number systems find their way into my process. I particularly enjoy finding new outcomes from arbitrary starting points and chance encounters.
“A Cube is a Rectangle / Ein Würfel ist ein Rechteck” numbers over 420 drawings of which several hundred will be on display at Box Factory for the Arts. For more information about my work take a look at my website here https://tomburtonwood.com or follow me on Instagram @tomburtonwood.