The words “I Rise Again, Changed but the Same” are engraved on the tombstone of 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, a reference to what he called the “marvelous spiral,” an equiangular spiral defined by its mathematical self-similarity — that is, by the principle that any given part follows the same ratio as the whole. Given the evolutionary advantages of its infallible mathematical constitution, Bernoulli’s spiral is ubiquitous in nature, the most recognizable example being the nautilus shell.Adopting Bernoulli’s phrase as its title, Kwade’s show is an appropriate inaugural outing for 303 Gallery’s new 21st Street location. The artist’s work, modular and rectilinear, investigates the formal properties of the space in which it is installed as much as it does its own materiality. The space is clean and shiny, but Kwade’s outlook is not. Resting against each of the gallery’s walls are sections of “Incident (Trait Transference),” 2016: coated mirror plates covered, to varying degrees, in a rusted metal patina, echoing the same-size Corten-steel plates lying adjacent — a rumination on temporality and decay. Echoing these themes is “Time Machine,” 2016, a scattering of dead leaves across the gallery floor that is swept along and stepped on by visitors. And in “Reality Zones,” 2016, interlinked gold chains hang coaxially from the ceiling. Each chain is bent into jagged angles, the contours of which recall the shapes of border markers between global time zones. While the shapes themselves are circular, the movement of time that they invoke is not: round yet progressive and with no endpoint, like a spiral.But it’s the three central sculptures, whose names comprise the exhibition’s title, that steal the show: “I Rise Again (fig. I),” “Changed (fig. II),” and “But the Same (fig. III),” all from 2016. The first, “I Rise Again (fig. I),” forms a large L, one panel of which is a plate of glass, the other a double-sided mirror. The mirrored panel is transected by a large bronze rod: on one side, it leans straight into the plate; on the other, it stretches to the ground in an exponential curve — yet another invocation of Bernoulli’s probability mathematics. And on both sides, where bronze meets mirror, the surface is concave, as if the rod were moving through a rippling membrane. To its right is “Changed (fig. II),” in which a mirrored panel bisects a large glass plate, this time forming a T. On either side of the mirror sit identical rock shapes: One is a real stone, the other an aluminum replica. To the right of that. the final piece of the set, “But the Same (fig. III),” features two staircases leading up into both sides of a single double-sided mirrored pane. A pack of cigarettes sits on the top step of each, one real, one candy — a visual pun on symmetry and facsimile.Because of their placement within the gallery, each of the three sculptures sitting kitty-corner to the next — mimicking a nautilus-shell shape — a sense of movement emerges among them. But there are perspectival limitations: At any given point in the gallery, the viewer cannot see the entirety of the installation. As in a maze, one has no sense of where one is, or how to get out, just a physical impulse to move on. Bernoulli’s hypnotic spiral goes on forever, theoretically, and Kwade’s arrangement, with mirrors indirectly reflecting themselves, gives the illusion that it does, too. However, much like the show’s title, it’s all paradoxical: The spiral, like many components of the individual sculptures that make it up, may go on forever, but it leads nowhere.The story goes that although Bernoulli wanted his epitaph to circumscribe the shape from which it’s derived, the workers who designed his tomb included the wrong spiral, an ironic postscript to the life of a man who devoted his career to probability. This anecdote resonates: Kwade, in her own work, seems less interested in reiterating the logic of the world than in exploring how such margins of error expand our capacity for alternate ways of seeing.“I Rise Again, Changed but The Same” is at 303 Gallery through July 14.
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