MOCA Pacific Design Center
A collaborative project between potter Adam Silverman and architect Nader Tehrani, Boolean Valley is a room-sized installation of four hundred cut, clay objects glazed in a colorful compound of cobalt and silicon carbide. Together, they create an undulating, topographic landscape of iterated and arrayed, semispherical and circular forms.
The arrangement and form of each ceramic in Boolean Valley are organized according to Boolean logic, which calibrates the geometry of intersecting objects. To create the installation, Silverman and Tehrani cut and glazed two hundred dome-shaped ceramic units horizontally at different heights, creating one dome and one curved cylinder from each original shape. The four hundred resulting pieces are arranged in curving patterns responsive to their variations in height. Finally, the artists chose their primary glazing compounds for allegorical reasons: silicon carbide is the source material for semi-conductors, a cornerstone of the real Silicon Valley’s industry; cobalt, used in Persian enamel for millennia, alludes to Tehrani’s home country of Iran.
Boolean Valley is organized by the Montalvo Arts Center for its 2009 initiative AGENCY: The Work of Artists, and is presented at MOCA Pacific Design Center as part of MOCA’s new exhibition series, Craft & Computation, organized by Brooke Hodge, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.