Golden

Mathematician and philosopher Adolf Zeising wrote in 1854 of the golden mean, also known as the divine proportion, as a universal law “in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.” This installation materializes the golden mean in the Gahlberg Gallery’s long narrow space, dividing and subdividing it as closely as possible to the golden ratio of 1:1.6180.   Theoretically this division can go on to infinity, but the obdurate physical materials used eventually prevent continued progression.  The wooden 2x4s used to delineate the divisions eventually become larger than the remaining space to be divided, making it doubly impossible to find the divine spot, unavailable now both theoretically (one can never reach the end of infinity) and practically.  At the point when I was forced to stop, I gold-leafed the general area, covering my bases, and literalizing the goldenness of the golden mean.