Go see this exhibition! -- it is a rare treat:
NO LEMONS, NO MELON
New York, NY 10001
essay by Carrie Moyer & Sheila Pepe:
NO LEMONS, NO MELON
"A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it it looks the same as before."
-- Hermann Weyl, Mathmetician (1885-1955)Symmetry: on the grand scale, the central core of monumentality, religiosity and heroics. And, in more intimate realms, a snowflake, the human face, that middle finger stretched high above the rest in angry defiance. There's something so pleasing, so satisfying about symmetry, cast in strident ambition or familiar repose.
Our own bodies are symmetrical. And yet we are not exactly that. Always just shy of the mathematically symmetrical, we are riddled with some degrees of the unsymmetrical. Some of us more than others. Biologists would argue that the less symmetrical among us will not mate. Modernists would court heroic irregularities in symmetry to set aside natural beauty in search of another, more dynamic understanding of the universe. And Postmodernists would corrupt those dynamics toward a fully heterogeneous field of inquiry in which the links between nature, beauty and symmetry seem a distant aspect of a failed grand scheme.
Whether the simple bilateral type, or ones filled with glides, shifts and rotations, there is most often reflection in symmetry. This mirroring is kin to but not always the kind of repetition that we have linked to the mechanics of copying, reproduction and appropriation. This seemingly narrow distinction, between the copy and the reflection is linked not only to the now commonplace issues concerning the voracity of authenticity, but also to a reinvigorated embrace of nature, through science and perceptual discovery.
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