Boolean Valley: The Geometry of Clay
Watching the slide show that Adam Silverman, a potter, and Nader Tehrani, a professor of architecture, presented at the opening of Boolean Valley was a little like watching a bullet train and a handcar speed toward each other on the same track. Images of Tehrani’s airy room-size projects—empyrean geometries worked out in thin-pressed wood or pleated plastic—alternated with close-ups of Silverman’s earthy, hand–thrown pots. Yes, they both trained as architects, but what sort of collaborative construction would meld their skills?
The answer came in a sketch from one of their planning sessions. (Several of these drawings accompany the installation.) Silverman pointed to a line of circular shapes, graduated in height. These, he explained, represented the basic output of a potter’s wheel: platters, bowls, columns. Grouped in a row, their stair-step ascent suggested a curve. Or, as Tehrani put it, there was now a horizon line. Ah. Mud meets mathematics. The windows may not have rattled, but the drawing, like a seismographic record, marks the moment when their allusive Valley took shape.
Their joint effort also introduces AGENCY: The Work of Artists, Montalvo’s yearlong series of pieces and performances exploring the theme of interdependence. Composed of nearly 200 identical clay pots--each sliced into two parts and nowhere more than knee high—Boolean Valley presently occupies a pair of adjoining galleries at the San Jose Museum of Art. From the beginning, then, we too can choose how to approach it. Arriving from the museum’s central hall we promptly encounter the terrain’s darkest and steepest aspect: a glittering headland of black, bullet-nosed spires. Entering from the opposite direction, we see instead its varying contours, the luxuriant interplay of blues and grays. Neither, of course, is the definitive view.
The installation consists of two basic shapes. One thrusts upward, the other spreads outward--the artists call them domes and hoops. Other names could be applied: missiles and craters, males and females, ones and zeros. Like all valleys, this one is formed by a specific arrangement of opposing forces. Slicing the pots at several carefully determined midpoints added another variable: height. Yet despite their derivation from a single prototype—call it a geometric ancestor—the objects before us are a mass of quirky individuation. Swollen, pitted, bubbled, and swirled, the surfaces vary in luster and hue; they show the marks of their manufacture and traces of the weather on the day they were glazed.
From the beginning Tehrani, Iranian by birth, knew he wanted one of the glazes to be cobalt. He responded to it, says Silverman, “because it’s a homeland color.” The mineral has been coloring Persian enamel for 5000 years. Silicon carbide, visible as a dull gray on some of the pots, is another story. As the source material for semi-conductors, its connection with the real Silicon Valley is evident. Recent history might lead us to see the two chemicals as emblems of warring interests, but in Boolean Valley they’re allies. Silverman has long used silicon carbide as an aesthetic wild card. Fired with cobalt or black, it produces his glazes’ distinctive craters and lumps. “When you collaborate,” Tehrani told a questioner, “you don’t want someone like you.” It’s from collisions of minds and methodologies, from unpredictable reactions, from accidents, he was suggesting, that new worlds arise.
About Ariel Swartley
Ariel Swartley lives in Los Angeles and writes about contemporary and uncontemporary culture. Her essays on music, fiction, garden design, comics, art, culinary history, radio, film and ethnobotany have appeared in Los Angeles magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Boston Phoenix and Rolling Stone.
