Harwood

July 2011 Archive

"As Much as I Can Carry: Personal Plans for Survival," Allyson Packer

Allyson Packer works in a variety of media, taking subject matter from her own life and using it to examine the human need to seek out structure and understand our place within it.  These ideas
are the basis for As Much as I Can Carry: Personal Plans for Survival, in which she creates installations reflecting on her experiences living in New Mexico. Using the theme of survivalism, her installations produce a portrait of an individual searching for structure and meaning in a mysterious environment.  

"Organic Recursion," Josh Lopez-Binder

Recursion is the process of repeating a number of steps, outputs from earlier steps are re-used as inputs.  Recursion is the basis of mathematical and biological fractals. The recursive process tends to create forms that resemble biological structures and systems that I strive to imitate and exaggerate. Fractals and recursion exist everywhere around us and in us.

In my art I use mathematically defined recursion, as in logarithmic spirals composed of pieces that rotate and scale relative to their parent objects, and as well as recursive ideas without the aid of mathematics. When I draw I often repeat patterns but let them scale or slowly change shape in a way that each successive form is related to its predecessor.  When making computer models and three-dimensional forms I sometimes scale and copy base objects according to whim, yet the process remains essentially recursive.  This type of recursion, unconstrained by mathematics or computers, is generated from the brain, and thus is Organic Recursion.