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Nasher Sculpture Center makes

room for unique 'Boolean
Valley'
12:00 AM CDT on Monday, March 29, 2010

By GAILE ROBINSON / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

People have told Adam Silverman and Nader Tehrani that their forest of
ceramic cones look like breasts, bombs, bullets and flowers. When they moved
their sculpture to the Nasher Sculpture Center recently, a visitor approached
and told them that it reminded him of grape hyacinths.

They just smiled.Silverman and Tehrani's work seems to

invite commentary, and they accept it without offering MAX
their own assessment. "It's important that it not be FAULKNER/Special
reducible to a single reading or icon, but that it has Contributor
multiple associative meanings," Tehrani says. Adam Silverman
and Nader Tehrani
Boolean Valley is their first joint project, and it has been decided the cone
well received at its past two locations. "They were white was the perfect form
box galleries," Silverman says. "One had natural light, for their Boolean
one had no natural light. One place was actually two Valley sculpture. It's
galleries. We designed it so it could go out in the world the first time the
and do different things. It's never been outside, never Nasher has extended
submerged in water. This is my favorite so far." an invitation to
display a temporary
"The generative idea was to marry or investigate the two
work.
different sides of their practice, the handmade intuitive
aspect of pottery with the precise technological aspects of architecture," says
Jed Morse, head curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

This is the first time the Nasher has extended an invitation to display a
temporary work, and Morse says the museum hopes this will lead to regular
displays of works by contemporary sculptors.

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One + one = more

Tehrani is a working architect, and Silverman is a ceramist; they met in

architecture school at the Rhode Island School of Design. Two years ago, they
were invited to an arts residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Northern
California and began work on a piece they eventually named Boolean Valley.

"It was important that, at the end of the discussion, we arrived at a place
where it wasn't an architect makes buildings or spatial environments and it's
not an artifact, not a big old pot. It had to be a landscape, something larger
than the sum of its parts," Silverman says. (Boolean is a math term for
rationalizing two or more sets, such as what computer search engines do when
seeking a phrase on the Web.)

It took them months to reach the aha moment.

"The easy default was I wanted to play architect, 'Let's make a building out of
tile,' " says Silverman. "When Nader starts a construction project, he
investigates the material and construction methods of a certain region."

So they began with clay forms.

"We looked at versions that looked like plates or rock," Silverman says. "But I
felt it was important that it could be turned. I would sit at a wheel and throw
round things."

Bad to the cone

Eventually they settled on a cone. "It's the perfect abstract shape," Silverman
says. "Then there were the brutal economies of this thing. How many can we
do? If we can only make 12 or 15, it wouldn't have had an environmental effect
at all. We needed at least 200 or 300. It had to be landscape scale, not
tabletop scale. My arm is 24 inches long, and that dictated the size."

He made a cone 2 feet tall by 12 inches across at its base, then cast that basic
shape 200 times. Then he cut the cones.

"Two inches from the bottom, 2 inches from the top and anywhere in between,"
he says. They were glazed in a dark iron-gray or cobalt-blue color. "The glazing
process was quite volatile. It does a lot of bubbling and frothing. When it cools,
we grind off the top layer of glaze so you see the bubbles."

The truncated cones are placed in a tight grid of undulating heights. Some of
the shallowest are underwater.

The negative space is as important as the height differences, Tehrani says. "It's

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about the space between the pots and how the accumulation of pots renders
the environment in different ways."

The work plays in a variety of ways on the Nasher's park grounds. The varying
heights reflect the water jets in a neighboring fountain.

The dark exterior of the cones mimics the dark stone of James Turrell's Tending
(Blue), the skyspace housed in a rough-hewn black granite box directly behind
the fountain. The circular openings of the blue cones suggest the portholes of
the skyspace. The long, horizontal configuration mirrors the planting beds and
makes the cones seem to be an organic element in the landscape.

The temporary piece looks as if it were part of the master plan, making it a
very successful, if short-lived, addition.Plan your life

Through June 6 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas. 11
a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays. $10, with discounts. 214-242-5100.
www.nashersculpturecenter.org.

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