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

playing a composer's piano.
the schoolboy's lunch wrapped in bach manuscripts.
invention of the hammerklavier.

The Human Scale

Photo Copyright: Leo Chow, SOM

human perception is an automatic dynamic biological and neurological function requiring no consciousness of its 600 million year evolving apparatus to define, edit, summarize, even presume the billions of stimuli your body receives each moment.  

human perception and human scale were two parallel lines that crossed in recent years. human scale has always been of great interest to my work beginning with rothko's canvas, le corbusier's modular man, da vinci's vitruvian man as well as other applications of proportion as golden mean, etc. human scale has been a manner for man to enter into a work completely or proportionately, like some connective tissue or shared breath of mathematical sublimity. as true in Architecture as in Art., human scale was a scale which pulled upon more sensory apparati than just the ocular, prompting fuller sensory awareness, a wholeness of submersion.

however this definition has only gone so far----larger works would automatically engage human scale and yet rothko eventually felt shut out of his own frames. body as measure brings "object"ness higher in the heirarchy for definition instead of perception itself. this unit whether body or object continues a separatist vernacular---furthering a gap felt between perceiver and the percept. the wholeness of submersion is not a scale of size but a scale of awareness---an awareness of the perceptual system that engages not in the totality of what a something is but a human experience of it-----it is the most rudimentary and simple of points and yet immeasurably true, ones degree of awareness of this is one's human scale.

the function of sensory perception is to bring an unknown into definition. attention brought to the moment before definition suspends the unknown––explores it––however minutely, and gives an experience of the human mechanoreceptive, proprioceptive, somatosensory scale. it is impossible and unnecessary to track the immensity of information our system summarizes but the experience of this scale can be brought to the edge of ones finger [as all senses]. human scale is a chosen moment in the awareness of this perceptive function----this is the works of the Protoist Series, as well as with other works of Art and Architecture. 

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.

“...but what does it mean?” Object vs Information

At the emergence of quantum investigation, Art followed, consciously or not, with Science’s shift from centuries-old object-based system of physical laws into the strong evidence of a more information-based or potentiality-based reality. The interacting billiard ball view of an outside world was being undone from a perspective on the very smallest yet foundational scale.

The question "...what does this mean? when confronted with an Abstract work of Art is illustrative of the point of where Art can lead the viewer/experiencer beyond the old Newtonian object-derivative surface reality towards a system a century of new Science has evidenced as inseparable information of all-potentiality. As viewer becomes experiencer, witness becomes participant, Abstract Form is no longer relegated to someplace outside one’s reality as confronting object or static learning but as inseparable information.

Art presents an experience of this Science. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside reality, its roots can be evidenced through great invention and new thought breaking the pattern of the habitual.

The physical experience of the Abstract in Modern North American Art (Heizer, De Maria, Turrell) began at the outer edges of shared experience, the uninhabited American Desert, and is now evolving inward, centered within the collective self or populated thought we name City. HELDAN inhabits this landscape. The isolated site for Art becomes almost an isolated occasion if relegated to a separated time or a separated place.

The scientific investigations of the physical laws that govern reality has moved from object centered to content/information centered. The Abstract Forms of Land Art signaled the frontier of this thought, at the horizon of this new landscape. The Abstract is not fixed to an area outside our reality, it is our reality. For over a century, the shift from the old yet still pervasive Newtonian reality as separate object-based content to the quantum suggested reality as inseparable information/potentiality-based content is shown through investigative parallel in Art. HELDAN’s permanent installation within the collective self or City evidences the dissolving or disassociation of objects as outwardly separate interactions in one’s reality to that of inseparable information.

I use Art as a gendenkenexperiment to that experience.

New Realism: Touching the Abstract

The Abstract is more than plastic Works in a museum, indeed, true abstraction is the very world outside. Neurological and somatosensory studies suggest the “outside” world as a percept-dependant sensory construct, what this series of works engenders as abstract realism. Sense perception is not objective and yet centuries-old science pervades the contemporary belief in an independent world of objects patterning self and “outside” reality. Indeed, “objects” have no complete separation in the less perceptible phenomenal worlds that form the life we perceive. Sculpture (Form) conceived for touch dissolves the percept’s veil of separation from “object only” to “experience” as/of self. When these Forms are Abstract, the profound permission of viewer into experiencer brings a third dimension of Abstraction as Self. PROTOIST Forms are Abstract Form; their experience of touch and the context of touch as the sole perception of self and the “outside” world allows for expanded experience in the realism of the Abstract. It is from this foundation Abstraction is the grand medium of direct encounter with the greater reality.