Calculus Problem

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Calculus Problem

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By McKenzie Toma

Poem (SUMM)

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ARTIST BIO

McKenzie Toma is the author of Wind Sock (Solano Archives, 2018). A MFA candidate in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives and works in Iowa City, Iowa.

ARTIST STATEMENT

This poem was written in Iowa City, Iowa. It is part of a series of poems that investigate identity and the self in conversation with void. It speaks to applying mathematical sense to issues that feel beyond the scope of organization and intelligence.

SUMM For the Love of Math! curated by Timea Tihanyi.

For many years, I’ve been collaborating with mathematicians and inviting them to have conversations with me about what their process of creative research is like. As a visual artist myself, I have long been intrigued by forms that attempt to distill complexity to some form of universal essence, abstraction that gets its special flavor from the makers touch, visual metaphors that resemble both architectural and biological beings, and the algorithmic logic of iteration, which creates multiples by constantly taking apart and reconfiguring.

The collection of artworks in this exhibition presents the viewer with a diverse array of creative practices, from traditional art mediums, like painting, drawing and sculpture, to digitally generated two and three-dimensional works, participatory games, puzzles, poetry and dance. The invited artists all share a kind of visual sensibility, and they also share something else important: mathematical thinking. Whether they are mathematicians, whose cutting-edge research is aided by visualization, or math educators bringing complex mathematical concepts closer to all of us with playfulness and charm, or art/design professionals inspired by the rhythm of abstraction, each exhibiting artist’s work explores an exciting and immersive universe. Their toolkits and intensions for giving form to an idea may be completely different, but each professes the artist’s passion for a healthy sort of exercising of the gray matter in the brain, some form of mathematical thinking.

Timea Tihanyi, visual artist, curator, educator