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23 - 03 December 2003
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FARI SHAMS, MIA TAYLOR 'Time' |
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Artist Statement
Fari Shams
Line dance 22cm x 70cm wood carved painting
The world is a cyclical system building up and breaking down in ways which are chaotic and unpredictable. But there is a beautiful simplicity and symmetry behind the façade of this chaos. There is an underlying simple structure behind our limited perception of the universe. Amalgamating mathematical knowledge with her passion for music, Fari investigates the interconnectedness between two subjects which have provided human beings with many deep insights into the world around them. The relationship between mathematics and music is explored within the wider context of how, explicitly or implicitly, mathematics shapes our perception of the world.
Simple Song 22cm x 70cm wood carved painting
What we see is not everything; our perception of objects, shapes and entities does not reveal their true nature. Everything presented to our sense of perception is the product of its evolution through time, and it is seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades and centuries, which have given form and structure to the world around us. The written symbols which describe the world of mathematics are not there to confuse but to help to provide ‘another perspective’ in forming our true understanding of the world. Fari’s woodcarvings have as their foundation concepts of harmony, symmetry and repetition. They are formed according to the Fibonacci number series whose applications encompass areas from Art to Music and Biology to Astronomy. Beside their mathematical foundations, they emulate the characteristics of sounds within a piece of music and adopt time as their raison d’etre. The compositions are therefore the static interpretations of a dynamic medium. By revealing the essential ingredients which for her characterise a piece of music, a finite image emerges. The collaboration between the three artists draws much of its inspiration from the ideas of Chaos Theory. Fractal images depicting behaviours of complex natural systems are an illustration that an infinite amount of information can be captured within finite space and this space becomes the canvas for their work.
Root 22cm x 70cm wood carved painting
Fari recently graduated from the City and Guilds of London Art School in Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art, and lives in London
Mia Taylor Time is repetitive, simple and infinite. It ticks away in the background giving life to something new at each moment. It gives a framework to our memories, and captures the most vivid aspects of our experience. The memory of a particular time associates objects, colours, textures and forms with itself. Therefore an experience which was once alive and boundless is reduced to a point in the past, a point, however, which is making and shaping our character and being. Mia collapses memory to a single image. Finite yet infinitely complex. The image is simple, cyclical, ordered and disordered, like time, is creator. It is aesthetic and colourful and exploits to its full potential the appealing properties of the materials which describe it. The materials as well as the simplicity of the image create a distraction for the viewer, one which probably prevents an objective and realistic view of the memory she is creating. Just as our senses of perception deceive us into believing the world to be simpler than it is, so these images extract and simplify experience until it is distilled to pattern, repetition and symmetry. The magnitude of time is unjustly abstracted into a pictorial, never ending story.
Steven Termini Pianist Steven Termini will be improvising live at the private view of Time on the 25th November 2003, in response to the work of Fari Shams. He is writing his Ph.D.at the Royal Academy of Music on the improvisations of Keith Jarrett, including applications of statistical mathematics and Chaos theory. He received 2nd Prize in the Boston Conservatory's Young Composer's Competition and the Continuum Ensemble's Competition for Improvisers (London), where he also earned a prize by audience vote. In a performance at the Kloster Andechs (Germany), the Deutsche Zeitung praised his "fiery brilliance, virtuosity, and excellent technique" while the Munchen Merker lauded his "tender and joyous grace", declaring "The excitement of the crowded audience from Munich and the Five lakes region knew no bounds."
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