Jen Stark‘s lush paper landscapes seem both psychedelic and scientific. Usingtrippy shapes and colors, she draws you into a placeof quiet mystery. It’s the kind of work that’sequally at home on the covers of science magazines and billboards.
Mathematicians, in particular, get rathertouchy feely about Stark’s work — they send her notes comparing her sculptures to complex equations and theories of infinity. One e-mailed her apaper byCornellUniversity mathematician Karen Vogtmann, pointing out the similarities between Stark’sBurst and Vogtmann’s concept of Outer Space. That’s not the spacewe know with the sun and the stars but rather a mathematical idea. An Outer Automorphism is a collection of groups, each filled with ways to map points of an object to itself, while maintaining the object’s deeper structure. It can get your brain all twisted up just thinking about it and so can Stark’s art objects.
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