For some people math inspires fear, sweaty palms and mind-numbing headaches. For others it inspires art.
Math adds up for Nicholas “Nikko” Mueller, a Southwestern College assistant professor of art.
Mueller’s latest exhibition, “The Forgetting Factor,” at the SWC Art Gallery, features 27 examples of his immensely elaborate and extremely logical art.
One such piece is “Bucky,” a mesmerizing geodesic dome named after Buckminster Fuller, a 20th century visionary. Standing 8 feet tall with a circumference of about 50 feet, the massive dome is made from steel tubing, cheesecloth, string and melted wax.
“I wanted this very rational, very futuristic space to get disrupted by something that was very different from that,” Mueller said.
That disruption happened to be a human touch, a sense of time and weathering, he said.
Several years ago while studying abroad in Rome, Mueller said he saw altars and shrines that were covered by ages of layered wax. That sensibility, he said, was what he wanted for “Bucky.”
Mueller and seven assistants, which included former and current SWC students, Professor of Art Marisol Rendon and her husband, Ingram Ober, assembled the dome and coated it with boiling wax over a period of four days.
Mueller said the process was maddening.
“I had to go in there with a blow torch,” he said.
The wax was set ablaze to create the effect he wanted, Mueller said. It dripped on his face and hair. He later admitted that it hurt, but not terribly.
FLIGHT OF FANCY – Mueller’s painting “Cockpit” in his exhibition “The Forgetting Factor.”
Photo by Bianca Quilantan
“Fire is an amazing thing,” he said. “It’s both beautiful and intimidating, so it was an interesting thing to work with.”
One of Mueller’s assistants, Grisel Marquez, an artist and SWC graduate, helped apply the wax. Wearing latex gloves, she said, she felt the heat firsthand.
“My hands,” she said, “they got to a point where I did not feel anything. The tips of my fingers were red and I was just like ‘Oh, where did my gloves go?’ They burned off.”
Mueller’s 26 other pieces on display are paintings, both large and small scale, mostly abstract. A few are figurative. One is on a redwood burl.
Bright neon and neutral colors appear in almost all the paintings, as do an array of geometric shapes.
“A lot of them are coming from variations of my own riffs on these designs that were done for (math) textbooks covers,” he said.
Mueller’s recent works tend to be autobiographical, he said, reflecting the environment of his childhood home, Philadelphia.
“When I grew up it had already been through some really rough times,” he said. “There was a lot of urban blight.”
Mueller described how in The City of Brotherly Love buildings were crumbling, factories were abandoned and whole quarters were in ruins. Yet the decay encouraged people to creatively use those spaces, he said.
Similar to Philadelphia’s architecture and the ideals of its founders, Mueller’s paintings are meticulously constructed, logically formed and idealized. They also show signs of deconstruction.
In some pieces, one can see this at play.
Mueller said he shot “Modern School,” a large, prominent painting of fluorescent geometric shapes on a tan canvas, with a water pistol to give it its drip effect.
For “F Church,” Mueller said he projected and traced fragments of a slew of paintings by Fredric Church, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt onto the canvas. He then scraped away layers with his palette knife. Those layers are visible when one looks closely at an angle.
“Sequential Mathematics”. “The Forgetting Factor” exhibition title comes from a story Mueller heard on the radio about mathematics who created an equation that modeled happiness. It included a “forgetting factor” that accounted for a degrading of a positive effect over time.
Photo by Bianca Quilantan
SWC Gallery Director Vallo Riberto said he loved the craftsmanship in Mueller’s work.
“It shows a level of professionalism that you just don’t see everyday,” he said.
Riberto said the dome came together much better than he had envisioned.
“I think it’s a stunning piece,” he said. “(Mueller’s) idea was to make it look as organic as possible, and I think he achieved it.”
Mueller is now in his third year at SWC.
Prior to teaching at SWC he worked at several colleges in Los Angeles, beginning in 2004.
Mueller said he doesn’t have any specific plans for the future of “Bucky” yet, but he has been given many suggestions, all of which make him wonder.
“It’d be cool hanging from some space, a large enough space as a full sphere,” he said. “Then it would become this suspended globe of dripping candles.”
“The Forgetting Factor” runs through Nov. 18. It is open to the public.