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Campus Sculpture Tour Irve Dell
SUITE FOR MATH AND COMPUTER SCIENCE, 2000 Irve Dell’s Suite for Math and Computer Science decorates and complicates Noyce Science Center. Five interrelated sculptural pieces comprise the installation that adorns the southeast stairwell leading to the math and computer science wing of the building. Dell’s installation focuses on the use of chalkboards: a surprising surface, but one that acts as a touchtone between art and math, as both disciplines use surfaces to express visual symbols, whether through proofs, equations, shapes, or drawings. Royce Wolf, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, finds the theme a fitting one: “I think it’s very appropriate,” he said. “I think that’s a very clever idea.” In fact, much of Dell’s work is clever. At the ground level of the southeast stairwell, Dell installed an almost disguised piece. A circular metal object affixed to a wooden base, Dell’s utilitarian sculpture disconcertingly blends with the fire alarm and gauges nearby. Yet its silver cover opens on a hinge to reveal the interior, an inscribed chalkboard. Exploring its circular space, the interior of the cover illustrates the formula for the circumference of a circle. Inside the now-revealed section of the base, another image has been created: a small window with shutters opens to reveal a recessed collection of chalk. This chalk, preserved behind glass and even decorated—the central piece milled to create decorative bands—slyly suggests the permanence of the piece. Although the presence of the chalk suggests change (or collaboration), the chalk sits behind glass, unreachable. Samuel Rebelsky, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, recalls that Dell mounted this piece as a specific response to the space: he hoped to comment on how the addition of external devices altered the original plan. In an interesting shift, Dell makes his response both changeable and unchangeable. Though its chalkboard surface is certainly alterable, Dell only provides a challenge for collaboration. Dell also mounted a piece directly on the railing of the stairway. This piece, in a shape suggestive of paneled altar paintings, opens to reveal another chalkboard that depicts an outdoor scene. The sculpture delicately examines the angles between various points in the illustration—the angle between the top of a tower and the ground, as well as the angle at which a human observer looks up to the sky. Its exact lines interact with the lines of its location—the slant of the stairwell—and the more complex asymmetrical shape of the chalkboard itself. At the landing of the stairs, a bulletin board acts as the site of the next piece. In this installation, two framed chalkboards with inscribed images intrude upon an otherwise functional bulletin board. In one, Dell playfully recreates Magritte’s The Treason of Images—his famed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) image, where that caption rests smugly below a careful rendering of a pipe. The other chalkboard depicts Klein’s bottle: a complex object wherein no true distinction can be made between the interior and exterior surfaces. Where the Klein bottle has a “non-orientable surface,” Magritte’s image challenges viewers’ normal visual orientation, as it presents a pipe visually and denies it in its caption. As Rebelsky notes, “‘This is not a pipe’ implies ‘This is not a Klein bottle,’” as a Klein bottle must be imagined in four dimensions in order to be seen in its fullness. In showcasing these images together, Dell links math and art to disrupt our conceptions of real, our ability to distinguish and label—between pipe/not pipe, interior/exterior. And in placing these images on chalkboards and installing them on a bulletin board where they rest among fliers and push pins, Dell deviously calls art/not art into question as well. Dell installed another piece on the south wall at the second floor landing. This sculpture acts as a sort of cabinet, constructed in a symmetrical geometric pattern and faced with silver-bordered stained glass doors. The stained glass suggests a landscape, with a green-yellow field rolling in front of mountain shapes. The doors open to reveal another chalkboard, this one inscribed with a depiction of a triangle. In an example of Dell’s careful (and playful) attention to space, this piece mimics the lines of the cinder blocks on the wall behind it. Dell’s installation enhances the stairwell as it challenges his audience’s ideas of what art may be and where it may be found. In his permanent drawings on a surface so often erased (the chalkboard), art intersects mathematics in a complex creative process. Dell himself explains the connection: “We, the artist and the mathematician, need to literally see our ideas before we can begin to understand them completely.” As a mathematician, Wolf finds chalkboards to be part of his own “creative process” as he moves from an internal visualization to the creation of an external object. “Sometimes,” he says, “I just have to scribble some stuff out.” Though Dell’s calculated work is far from scribbling, it does work to embody complex thoughts in a visual manner.About the Artist: Irve Dell, associate professor of art at St. Olaf College, Minn., received a B.A. in Biology from Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. (1983), and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Minnesota (1988). His work, often commissioned by institutions such as Grinnell College, has been shown extensively in Minnesota: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the University of Minnesota Museum, and Thomas Barry Fine Arts, among other locations. An accomplished artist, he was awarded a grant from the Jim Henson Foundation (2004-05), and he won the Bush Artist Fellowship in 2000. Essay by Maggie Campbell '02 and Christine Hancock ‘06 |
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| last updated 5/25/06 | Copyright © 2006 Grinnell College Grinnell, Iowa 50112 | 641-269-4660 |
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