Pioneer Works, Brooklyn
September 9 – November 20, 2022
Charles Atlas: The Mathematics of Consciousness centers on a newly commissioned multimedia installation that takes inspiration from the seminal film and video artist’s ongoing interests in science and math—particularly, memory, thought formation, and numerical expressions. Combining original footage and segments culled from his extensive archives, the immersive video work extends across 100 feet of the institution’s interior architecture, projecting flickering images throughout its windows that simulate the ways in which ideas appear in the human mind.
Atlas envisions the brick wall of Pioneer Works’ Main Hall as an analogue for the brain, divided into left and right sections. Unified by an original score by musician and collaborator Lazar Bozic, the video toggles between numerical fantasies, dance sequences, abstract compositions, scientific ruminations, and internet memes to encapsulate the artist’s disparate thoughts and ideas. The work builds on a series of projections that he has completed over the past few years, including Geometry of Thought (2019) on the 2.5-acre facade of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart and Angel Dust (2021) on a free-standing, 19th-century Indian Pleasure Pavilion at Luhring Augustine Gallery.
The artist notes, “I have been making large-scale, site-specific installations since 2007, and animating the architecture of Pioneer Works represents my biggest challenge to date. Instead of creating a single wall-sized composition, I am creating twenty-six distinct videos projected to fit the windows, and filling the voids in between. I consider space and time to be my media, and this has led me to a fascination with physics, consciousness and cosmology—scientific themes woven together with my sustained interest in portraiture, performance and dance.”
Since his beginnings as filmmaker-in-residence for Merce Cunningham Dance Company during the early 1970s, Atlas has collapsed the barriers between dance, performance, and media, often collaborating with a dynamic roster of creative figures to harness a distinctly multidisciplinary and experimental point of view. The Mathematics of Consciousness continues a number of these working relationships.
A prominent component of the installation is a stage designed by artist Mika Tajima, who previously collaborated with Atlas at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009) and South London Gallery (2011), in collaboration with Chadha Ranch, which transforms industrial scaffolding into an armature for performances featuring ongoing and new collaborators, and discussions that consider the theoretical origins of consciousness and mathematical sequences. A direct response to Atlas’s video, Tajima’s sculptural environment makes a conceptual connection between black holes and the meridian system that maps and circulates energy within the human body—both of which represent the ungraspable and unknowable, within and beyond.
Analogous to the action of acupuncture needles, javelins puncture illuminated, gradient surfaces that outline both black hole star formations and energy pressure points of the body. In ancient times, javelins were used for hunting, sport and war, and now is the common name for the handheld missile used by Ukrainian forces to defend against the Russian invasion. Embodying chaos and entropy, the spears rupture the hole diagrams and grid architecture, resisting the imperative to control, systematize and contain.
Exhibition page: Pioneer Works
