Chaos is the title of a new exhibition of Gem Preiz’s fractal art, now open at The Eye art gallery, curated by Mona (MonaByte). It is an exhibition those familiar with Gems work might find surprising in terms of the visual style of the images presented.
“Confronted with the mysteries of the origins, Gem says in describing the exhibition, “And with the question of the determinism of the Nature, Man has, from Hesiod’s Theogony to the most recent mathematical theories, attempted to tame Chaos, first by naming and personifying it, then much later by putting it in equations which remain unsolved.”
And so it is that we are presented with twelve images which are raw in nature, very different to the sweeping vistas of fractally generated architecture, landscapes and deep space scenes we are perhaps more familiar with seeing. Instead, these images present a far more primal force, one both alien and yet familiar.
Examining these pieces is like looking back at the formation of Earth itself. In some, the reds and golds suggest a time when volcanism was rife across the planet, giving rise to swirling, sluggish rivers of lava and molten rock which crept outwards from craters and fissures, flowing over a prehistoric landscape, shaping it and, as they cooled, becoming part of it before other flows replaced or added to them. In others, the blues and whites suggest the points where land and water met and engaged in a battle for dominance.
All are representative of primordial settings, places utterly uninhabitable – but which, in their formation and evolution, helped bring forth the very stuff of life itself: liquid, chemicals and minerals, which in turn gave rise to the first living organisms, setting off a chain of events which led down through the aeons to – us.
There is also something else here. We often speak of order arisen out of chaos; as Gem points out, there is something of a poetic balance in these images. Each of which presents a chaotic scene, yet each one is fundamentally built out of the order of code and mathematics. Thus each of them offers a fresh interpretation of the complex intertwining of order and chaos.
SLurl Details
- Art Gallery The Eye (Cape Paradise, rated: Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 