WORK by NICHOLAS BOHAC, RICHARD HOUGHTEN,
MARY ANNE KLUTH, CASEY SHANE LOGAN, and GARETH SPOR

CURATED by ADAM FRIEDMAN and KATIE SHERMAN (2008 Participants in Mission 17’s Curatorial Internship Program)

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
-Albert Einstein

The harmonious systems of the universe, as we understand them, are called the cosmos, and the rest—the infinite void of physical space and the unknown arrangements of the natural world—is chaos. Through the pursuits of art and science, man chisels away at questions about its possible substance and order. The progress of technology and scientific study has provided us with extensive information about the world in which we live, but it also has contributed to generating newfound crises and, paradoxically, revealed the limits of our knowledge. As a result, we now more than ever confront our natural surroundings with feelings of curiosity, fear, and awe. Cut Into Chaos presented five artists who provide unique lenses to look at our natural world, the greater macrocosm, and the disciplines we have established to comprehend them.

Nicholas Bohac amasses images, prints, and a variety of materials to create fantastical, panoramic scenes of nature. His collages present a different take on the “traditional landscape” by making human intervention – and, by extension, our need to construct and be in command of our surroundings – acutely evident in the creation and presentation of his work.

Richard Houghten translates the frequencies of his sound recordings from the city, nature, and the places they overlap, into a single laser projection. His project distills the complex differences between these spaces into a concise, minimalist visual language.

Mary Anne Kluth’s watercolors are studies of the sublime, which assume both flat and sculptural forms. Amidst vibrant explosions of color, Kluth delicately paints people—such as scientists, surveyors, and explorers—engaged in investigating the awe-inspiring power of nature.

Casey Shane Logan’s sculptures critique the human tendency to rationalize nature, and the absurd notion that the Earth can be organized in a utopian order. However, his work also displays a wit and ingenuity that empathizes with our desire to make such systems work.

Gareth Spor works in diverse media to explore states of wonderment achieved when people contemplate things larger than themselves. He focuses specifically on the physics of light, the notion of the cosmos, and geometry to explore how these subjects inform one another.