“Angles in America”

Jim Isermann, Untitled (Cube Weave), 1997.

Photo: Michael Tropea

Guest curator Terry R. Myers adroitly identifies seven American artists from the past 40 years who use geometry as an approach to both art and life. Most contemporary geometric art derives from formalism—which dictates that art should be about form and medium alone—but in this exhibition, the word angles also signifies points of view.

For example, New York–based artist Mary Heilmann’s photographic diptych Converge (2007) pairs a slanted checkerboard pattern with a highway receding into the distance. Both images share color tones and perspectival vanishing points, but one is a photo from Heilmann’s everyday experience and the other is from her art practice. The late Gordon Matta-Clark, who was the subject of a massive retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year, is the show’s best-known figure. Myers sets up an intriguing contrast between Circus or The Caribbean Orange (1978)—which documents the geometric voids Matta-Clark carved into a Chicago building’s walls and roofs with a chain saw—and Tree Dance (1971), the artist’s film of dancers cavorting amid tree branches. These works demonstrate that Matta-Clark’s fixation on space and volume (fundamentals of geometry) in the built environment extended to nature.

Our only complaint is that an exhibition with so many ideas lacks a proper catalog essay. Myers obviously has much to say about these artists’ practices that he only hints at in the press release.

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