JOEY NORWOOD – HA-I-KU-BA-TI-O-N (IN THE YURT)

This exhibition round includes works provided by Joey Norwood which will be on view in the Third Floor West Gallery from February 7  – March 30, 2024.  Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public.  The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you!  The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, March 30 from 5-7 pm.

 

About the exhibit:

Tesseracts condense
Into the third dimension:
Many unfoldings!

“Ha-i-ku-ba-ti-o-n (in the yurt)” is the result of seventeen months of sporadic contemplation of three dimensional (3D) unfoldings of the four dimensional (4D) hypercube (or tesseract) in a yurt in Vermont.
Salvador Dali, very famously, used one such unfolding (or “net”) of the 4D hypercube in his painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) in 1954. In 1966, mathematicians were asking how many more unfoldings existed, and by 1985, it was determined that there are 260 more unique unfoldings of the 4D hypercube.

The purpose of this exhibit is to examine some of these permutations of eight connected cubes with respect to their specific shapes  and how they can evolve into each other. Interestingly, grouping them according to their orthogonal 2D shadow sets reveals four groups (in order of decreasing rarity):
7-3-7, 7-6-4, 5-7-5, 6-5-6, where the numbers are how many squares make up the shadow, while delineating the maximum number of squares (always seventeen) that are visible from one direction.
There is only one 7-3-7, though it has a left handed and a right handed version.
There are twenty two 7-6-4 forms.
There are twenty four 5-7-5 forms.
The 6-5-6 group contains the largest amount by far at 214!
It was the twenty four 5-7-5 forms that reminded me of the poetry form known as haiku.

“Haikubation” (my preferred pronunciation is “high cube 8 shen”) in traditional Japanese haiku form could theoretically have seven ‘on’ (syllables) thus: ha-i-ku-ba-ti-o-n (with the dashes, consisting of 17 characters).
Incidentally, the seventh prime number is 17.

Seventeen squares seen
At once in three dimensions:
How many in four?

 

About the artist:

Joey Norwood is an Alabama native whose art usually focuses on abstract concepts presented as installations. He has exhibited in Lowe Mill since its conversion into an artist’s haven nearly twenty years ago. Most recently, he transformed the First Floor Ramp Gallery into a minimalist installation entitled “Hyperfactual” in January/ February 2022, which continued his use of stop action projection as a preferred medium. In March 2022, just after that installation, he finally solved a problem he had been working on since his Third Floor East Gallery installation “Hind-Sight is Twenty-Twenty”: categorizing the 261 (or 9×29) unique unfoldings into four groups based on their 2D shadows. That was the moment that the nucleus of the current exhibit coalesced.

To find the the gallery in Lowe Mill A&E, click MORE INFO below (Tickets are NOT required.)