Releasing Center

copernicus, galileo, grothendieck

the center of our sensory/intellectual bias has found different positions in the last thousand years. eppur si muove. the practice of re-locating the center of our thought, world, and greater phenomena, enough times eventually releases the comfort of needing center altogether. 

a relative point of view provides a point of thinking. 
but not a place, position, or object more privileged than any other.

this work is interested in the conversation of its measurements

First Light

christine corday. NOUMERAL 100 Series

as our universe grows increasingly cold and dark, our telescopes/satellites follow the first light, the first heat, tracing us to the moment all matter arises.

this work also follows heat, a focus on the sensory satellites sending knowledge from the untested edges of our perceptual system, bringing the experience of light, its information and knowing to a dark and silent brain.

as sculptor, it is not simply the material that interests me---

it is the experience within it.

temperature opens this exploration.

tremendous cooling allows ordinary matter to form

and tremendous heat gave its existence

both at unimaginable scales---

and yet the elements within our body carry its scale--

the experience of the supernova, [even twice or more]

the experience of gravity on a scale 100-1000x that of earth

the experience of billions of years that define becoming

the elements within the generation and evolution of our sensory organs have an experience beyond our own body---a particular trait or knowing in common---a shared medium beyond the first light.

Protoist Series: Selected Forms. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; December 13 2014 - April 5, 2015. Director: Michael Govan. Sponsor: Lannan Foundation

Protoist Series: Selected Forms Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA

touch indexically registers memory on the material surface as rust–

an intimate yet shared public surface.

Forms of this Protoist Series began as a painter replacing paint with heat; investigating material states through tremendous melting cuts of great temperature suspending elements of iron, carbon, manganese, copper and silicon in a moment between solid and liquid states as well as between sensory stimulus and definition.

Curators: Franklin Sirmans, Holly Harrison

Protoist Series: Selected Forms Photo:©2015 Museum Associates/LACMA

Christine Corday. HELDAN. Elemental Metal. Photo ©2017 Corday

the work. at the pace of evolution.
a 600 million year sensory architecture in contact with the next
13.8 billion
like hadaen earth some 4 billion years ago with a surface reprocessed by the impacts creating, burying and mixing of material by material, generating great melt.
so continues the iron, carbon, maganese, silicon, copper and trace elements of these Forms to exist for a time in our hands as the buildings we put up and take down, culture sustains what lasts as our shared terrestrial Form.
the work is the relic as well as fragment futures of mankind's best thinking not the laws of nature itself.

the work. the tool of the object.

the work. time is not a concern in the linear or current experiential sense with interests in past as backward, future as forward etc but rather time as concerned with a duration or position of perception, a particular focus of state/states of a material, of an element. 

Christine Corday. HELDAN. Elemental Metal. Photo ©2017 Corday

The Tight Bud of Openness, (a subtle shift in a closed system)

"There are times in science when progress can only be made by revolutionary ideas" Nobelprize.org

If matter is never truly created or destroyed, just as its equivalent, energy, but merely changes or re-arranges form from one state to another––any state of matter then is transformation, a transfer of information or potentia (as Aristotle termed it) and with this, what part does our sight and touch play as we are not simply witnesses to but inextricably "of" this––and yet the unaided human eye takes a seat at such a surface level of matter's seeming creation and destruction. Is this deeply ingrained Cartesian philosophical split of mind and matter? What do we "see" with our sense of sight? How is what we see the role of observer and participant in the state of matter? If sight is the resulting perception of visible light that reaches our eye but perhaps even more so the unconscious inference that requires well-known assumptions and patterns based on prior visual experience of the world––the conscious awareness of this and experiences with abstract unknowns can experiment with the resulting perceptions of sight and touch. Perhaps the human brain over the next millenia evolves our somatosensory and other neurological systems––in the meantime, our sense of "knowing" may be a tool into investigating the senses more fully––developing physical senses to the larger base reality of mass and energy––developing another awareness; this is the great opportunity of Art.

In the early spring of 2001, my use of paper, board or canvas as a choice in the immediate dispersal of an idea waned––the preparation of its substrate, a former ritual to the developing blueprint, grew to an almost full disregard of the "vehicleness" of the 2-dimensional plane. Accidental rips, stains, or eventual dissolvement/age of the 2D vehicle brought more intensity to the insistence of the idea at its 2D surface---further dimension(s) were needed. This was reinforced by a complete fascination with the paint itself and how it transformed into another image––every tool, every substrate felt all the more transitory.

The transition into Form, Sculpture was driven by the "existence" of the idea––what if anything is indestructible within any idea. If drawing a Form on paper, the stroke of the charcoal focuses on this––the destructible and the indestructible nature of Form. The stroke of this charcoal line then is similar to a momentary stroke of light in a darkened room.

One of the many reasons science enters my studio is its demand of a simple fundamental persistent openness, a budding thought and this is to remain open to the fact that measurements on the smallest elementary particle level do not bring completely objective results. This point can be as well argued as sustained however regardless of the ouroboros intellectualizing as to what is ever truly objective––this provocational thought reduced to its simplest seed renders one with a tiny mysterious openness and unknown which should be an extension to each of our physical human senses. This again is the great opportunity of Art.

A small openness that desires no answer other than remaining open to what determines what is––this pause in perception in the larger arenas of mass, like with Art, frees the addiction of collapsing all perception immediately into definition, into complete objectivity; again, this demands another awareness––a development of one's sense of the unknown.