Interdisciplinary artist Christine Cassano stacked over 500 translucent porcelain forms resembling human vertebrae atop a horizontal mirror in 2022, collaborating with intermedia artist Shomit Barua to create Degrees of Granularity at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As viewers neared the installation, they heard motion-reactive audio created by the subtle impacts of their movements on these forms meant to disintegrate over time much like the human body ultimately returns to the earth.

Cassano has been creating the forms by hand, imprinting each one with her own fingerprints, since 2012, when shaping the material became a way to process a hip replacement surgery. “It was my way of working through what had happened inside my body,” Cassano told Hyperallergic. “When I make them I feel connected to consciousness; my hands don’t have to be told what to do, they just know.”

She calls these small forms noēma, explaining that the term means “mental object” or “content of a thought.” The forms run throughout her current body of work, including paintings and drawings she calls “mental equations.”

Recently, Cassano has been making bronze noēma for an installation that will hang suspended inside an atrium at form & concept during its upcoming Arrivals exhibition, as well as large-scale paintings created by dipping the forms in paint, then setting them atop surfaces where they oscillate and make marks in response to vibrations.

Η συνέχεισ εδώ.