The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Sonia Almeida: Forward/Play/Pause on view February 7–April 6, 2014.
Stacking π and Dismantling π relate the Greek origins of Western thought on abstraction to the symbol π, used to symbolize the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and which represents an infinite string of numbers. “What can be more abstract,” Almeida notes, “than the idea of the infinite in a mathematical constant?” A number of her works also connect to ancient color theory and the belief that all color arises from a mixture of black and white.
By looking to how painting can share in the codes or norms of other art forms, Almeida’s work serves as a type of “re-mediatization.” Screens or projections, most often associated with film, are operative in her leaning floor pieces, such as Blue Filter, and in her paintings backlit by LEDs. Forward/Play/Pause and Silver Screen also relate painting to moving images by connecting archetypal forms, such as the vessel, to icons for media interaction, which taken together support an experience of continuity between discontinuous objects and temporalities.
Almeida often translates forms and concepts explored through her sketchbooks into other supports. These sketchbooks, a selection of which are on view, draw forth her interest in the relationship between translation and the loss of information as a visual and temporal phenomenon, much as precise colors cannot be reproduced when converting between color spaces that occupy different subsets of the visible spectrum.
MIT List Visual Arts Center
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Cambridge, MA
listart.mit.edu