Exhibit reveals secret powers of basic design building blocks (sort of)
In our desperate playpen attempts to ram square pegs through round holes, we were taught to appreciate the nature of the world’s most basic shapes. Ever since, we have encountered circles, squares, triangles, and their continued repetition on a daily basis.
While we often take basic design elements for granted, there are some that celebrate what most reserve for categorization as elementary. Sarah Dolomore and Monika Hauck are among them. From Jan. 23-26, their show Forces of Form stored up Zavitz gallery with basic geometrical elements that left viewers questioning the secret powers of forms that hold an everyday familiarity.
Entering the gallery, viewers were faced with a grid of old vinyl records fixed to a wall.
“If you try and keep it in your field of view and try not to blink, your depth of space starts to bend and it kind of comes right off the wall,” said Dolomore at the Jan. 25 opening. Separated by a nut and a washer, compact discs were also fixed to the centre of each of the records, which also displayed off-white rings. All of these elements worked together to arrive at the optical effect Dolomore described.
Mirrored on the walls adjacent to Dolomore’s grid, Hauck had arranged drafting tools in a shockwave-resembling pattern.
The piece that brought Dolomore and Hauck together for the show, however, was an origami-like sculpture that might have been interpreted as a minimalist’s reimagining of an iceberg. Exhibiting triangles, parallelograms, and other basic shapes, Hauck also projected a complicated line image onto her sculpture.
“Both the sculpture and the drawing have very similar qualities in terms of crystalline form. So when I project the drawing onto it, [the crystalline form is] completely disrupted by the light and the linear qualities,” Hauck explained, pointing to how the straight lines on her drawing bent when they hit her sculpture. “I guess the idea of Forces of Form is just us exploring shapes and geometry and opticality and what space and light can do to these objects.”
Striving for accessibility, Dolomore and Hauck simply meant for their show to identify the potential that basic design elements possess.
“You get the message, even if you can’t put it into words,” Dolomore said. She admitted that even her and Hauck couldn’t attach a name to the kind of power possessed by the shapes and patterns at their show. “There’s something [in these pieces] that we can’t quite put our finger on and haven’t really tried to talk about really, but we just know it’s there.”
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