VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
JUL 19 – AUG 19, 2024
Reginald Brooks
Ocean of Numbers
Ocean of Numbers features animations and paintings by artist and scientist Reginald Brooks. The exhibition includes highlights from Brooks’ expansive and prolific practice grounded in mathematics and number theory. His multimedia artworks both examine and demonstrate multitudes of combinations that can be made with simple “ingredients” with implications for human connection and complexity.
“…While works in mathematics may seem removed from the connections with our real lives, nothing could be further from that. Work in pure math — number theory — is itself a highly creative endeavor that parallels that of any other creative activity that requires critical thinking, risk taking, imagination, perseverance, and lots and lots of trial and errors…” — Reginald Brooks
Reginald Brooks is a multimedia artist and science writer with degrees in Science, Cell Biology, and Medical Technology. After years as a medical research specialist, he returned to the visual arts. He also writes on mathematics and physics. Together they inform his paintings, drawings, animations, sculpture, and new media art.
"Primes vs. No-Primes", animation with composite of paintings and digitally filtered variations
Artist’s Statement About the Work
While works in mathematics may seem removed from the connections with our real lives, nothing could be further from that. Work in pure math — number theory — is itself a highly creative endeavor that parallels that of any other creative activity that requires critical thinking, risk taking, imagination, perseverance, and lots and lots of trial and errors. And ultimately it is about connections! It’s all about connections. How do we relate to each other? To what extent are we all but simple combinations of the exact same ingredients? How is diversity — that that is simply a new combination of the same parts — not wonderful and wonderful to welcome and explore with all the other combinations?
For the past several years I have been working with the primes — you know, numbers that are different in the sense that they can only be divided by themselves and one — to better understand just how these “atoms” of the number universe can and do co-exist with all the other patterned numbers. The biggest thing I learned so far is that they don’t exist alone. Not even close. They are intimately connected to every other number, often in multiple ways. This seems to go beyond the fact that they make up all the other patterned (composite) numbers. While true, they nevertheless embed themselves within the other numbers in the most intricate and delicious ways imaginable! And all the numbers are enriched by their presence. Nothing shows this more than the simple doubling of quantity one to become two, two to become four, four to become eight and so on. Within this fundamental fractal (“Butterfly Fractal 1”) the running sums will inform an incredibly rich and luxurious vista that includes mountains, rivers, valleys and oceans of the mind!