OPENING: Luke Jerram seeks insights into cold data through sensual three-dimensional form

Luke Jerram used a stock market chart mapping the economic collapse of 2008 in a work entitled Crash!, one of several three-dimensional renderings of data on view at the Heller Gallery from June 8th – July 6th. courtesy: www.lukejerram.com

We live in an age of data — more of it is available than ever before thanks to new technology, and new devices with which to keep track of it. But how best to visualize that data and provide new insights into its meaning? This question has preoccupied British artist Luke Jerram for years, and was the focus of his 2011 artist residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. Back in December of last year he spoke with the Hot Sheet about a number of his highly ambitious and technical projects that offered new perceptions of information — aural or visual. His Tide rendered the moon’s gravity as sound; Aeolus transformed wind patterns into song. And, in a body of work that will be on view in Jerram’s upcoming exhibition at Heller Gallery “Revealing the Invisible,” various line charts have been used to define the profile of three-dimensional vessels, wedding technology and cold data with inspired visual representation.

In this detail from Jerram’s Chandelier No. 1, dozens of glass radiometers, which shimmer and flicker as they turn in the sunlight, form the solar powered kinetic chandelier. courtesy: heller gallery, nyc

Jerram’s “Chandeliers“ were born out of the artist’s fascination with “light, engineering and science,” as well as the fact that he is colorblind. As he told the Hot Sheet, his colorblindness got him “interested in optics and the way the eye works and how we see the world.” The solar radiometers of which the Chandeliers are built cause them to flicker and turn in response to changes in light quality. They utilize light as a means of punctuation, while his well-known “Glass Microbiology” series uses glass’s ability to visually advance and recede. With “Microbiology” Jerram responded to artificially colored images of microscopic organisms; the series offers alternative (and, since they are made of transparent glass, probably more representationally accurate) visualizations of the HIV and SARS viruses as well as E. coli, malaria, and even potential mutant bacteria.

This impetus to offer alternative representations of data was with Jerram during his residency at the Museum of Glass in 2011, where he developed the idea of representing graphs as three-dimensional glass objects. Here, Jerram-as-artist had a concept both exciting and relevant. But Jerram-as-engineer had a problem, one that perhaps speaks to the severity of the US’s current economic climate: hot glass processes would not allow for the sharp lines necessary to accurately represent a graph of the New York Stock Exchange (a tumultuous eight years spanning from 2004 to 2012).

Once he returned to the U.K., he managed to make a model of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over a twenty-two year span by using a wooden form to render a mold. The Stock Exchange proved too complex even for this process—Jerram had to create an entirely new glass composite material in order to achieve the detail and clarity he was after. These two pieces are incorporated into his “Rotated Data Sculptures” series; others in the series include his T?hoku Japanese Earthquake Sculpture (inspired by a seismogram of the 2011 earthquake) and 28 Seconds of Hiroshima (inspired by an audio file of the Hiroshima atomic bomb).

What “Revealing the Invisible” provides is a new perspective on so-called “invisible” phenomena. It uses familiar forms in order to remind us that it is all too easy to be abstracted from or become numb to phenomena of light, or tragedy.

—Isabella Webbe