James Mai
"Heart of Sky"
Digital print, 24" x 24", 2005.
"Epicycles"
Digital print, 13" x 30", 2005.
James Mai
Associate Professor of Art, School of Art, Campus Box 5620, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761, USA
" A significant portion of my visual work emerges from combinatorial and permutational processes. I am interested in generating finite form-sets in which the individual forms are at once similar (all forms share the same basic elements) and unique (each form is a distinct configuration of those elements). These form-sets are both exhaustive (all variations are played out according to a set of permutational or combinatorial rules) and non-redundant (no form repeats another by symmetric transformation). Usually I make paintings from traditional materials; when I employ digital media it is not for the purpose of calculation but for precision and speed of production. This is to say that I am particularly interested in making these mathematical relationships perceptually understandable to the eye, and so when generating these form-sets there are thresholds of complexity beyond which I choose not to go. For the eye to understand not just the individual forms but the ordering principles by which those forms have come into existence, the art work must successfully translate these mathematical relationships into the the language of vision, into equivalent relationships of shape, color, scale, and distribution. Beyond these formal investigations, but still rooted directly in them, the artworks have a metaphoric dimension as poetic meditations on nature's order and human endeavors to know it. "
jlmai@ilstu.edu