Exhibition catalog for Several Circles, curated by Marco Antonini, which was on view at the EFA Project Space Gallery from April 4 - May 17, 2014.

Artists: Joe Brittain, John Cage, Mia Goyette, Vladimir Havrilla, Rachel Higgins, Music Animation, Machine (Stephen Malinowski), Mamiko Otsubo, Irgin Sena, Slobodan Stošić, Alina Tenser

This group exhibition took its title from Vasily Kandinsky’s Several Circles, a 1926 painting that epitomizes Kandinsky’s co-optation of geometric form, a consequence of his exposure to Russian Constructivism and to the unfolding utopias that defined the cultural and social climate of the October Revolution. Geometry, for the author of Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane, was a way to access and communicate universal truths and feelings.

Kandinsky also believed there was a correspondence among forms, colors, and sounds. (“The circle,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “is simultaneously loud and soft.”) This phenomenon is known as synesthesia, which is often deemed a neurological condition, and occurs when the stimulation of one sense leads to automatic, involuntary stimulation in another sense. An example of synesthesia is “hearing” colors. This exhibition takes this theory a step further. Recent scientific evidence indicates that the word synesthesia has been incorrectly used to describe connections among stimuli that are in fact induced by semantic representations. The artworks in “Several Circles” are aligned with the newer diagnosis of ideaesthesia: a phenomenon in which concepts evoke perception-like experiences. In other words, these concepts—such as a letter inducing color in the mind’s eye, as learned from refrigerator-magnet alphabets at an early age, or understanding “mu5ic” as “music,” by exchanging the letter “s” with the number “5”—trigger reactions that we believe we comprehend through our senses.

If such perception-events are more about ideas and concepts—our own, or those we glean through interactions with different communities or society at large—to what extent would notions such as popular visual tropes, specific cultural references, or language itself tend to be associated with physical sensations? And how?