Falke Pisano
at RedCat

Falke Pisano, The Value of Mathematics at REDCAT (installation view) (2015). Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

An odd structure that resembles both a guillotine and some sort of medieval measuring apparatus stands in the back corner of Falke Pisano’s new exhibition at RedCat. The room is full of such structures, vaguely familiar but certainly abstracted—a series of leaning white triangles on top of a minimal wooden stand, an architectural model made up of entirely of black rectangles. The show, titled The Value in Mathematics, has a somewhat complicated premise: it’s Berlin-based Pisano’s attempt to engage with ideas of people who write about the construct of mathematics. Throughout the exhibition, plaques are posted, the quotes on them pulled from mathematicians and philosophers’ musings on “the language of math.” For instance, one such plaque quotes philosopher Michael Serres discussing how the “truth” of scientific language transforms whenever any one element of it is questioned or revised.

It seems Pisano’s objects are attempts to capture this contradiction between scientific truths and their slipperiness. The choices she has made—to lean t-shaped black metal sculpture against a column, to suspend a felt cap from a string—feel confident but also grounded in a subjective, not-quite-obvious logic. This, she’s suggesting is how the language of math functions: obliquely. While the sculptural objects may not have a completely captivating presence in their own right, as attempts to visualize the strangeness of science’s authority, they are rare instances in which a degree of inaccessibility works quite nicely.

Falke Pisano: The Value of Mathematics runs from May 9–June 28, 2015 at REDCAT (631 W 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

Catherine Wagley writes about art and visual culture in Los Angeles.

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