Tauba Auerbach’s show Here and Now/And Nowhere opened last Thursday at Deitch Projects. The symphonic exhibition included  photographs, paintings, sculpture and and a musical performance with Cameron Mesirow of Glasser, which she will be recreating tonight at Deitch at 8pm.  Tauba took a moment to discuss how logic, reason and math unexpectedly led her to experiences of spirituality, childhood handwriting and entangled particles.

The anagram in the title of your show led me to expect works involving word plays, like you’ve shown in the past. I was surprised when there were none to be found. Are you making an intentional shift away from words and language?

It’s more of a shift towards new things than a shift away from old things. But these new abstract pieces are about a lot of the same ideas as my text pieces – merging opposites or conflicting states – and through that, questioning the idea of a logical violation or the idea of logic in general. A lot of the work in the show is about unifying the “conflicting” states of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality.

Your work is so ordered and rhythmic. I’m curious if your work habits follow a similarly systematic pattern. Do you have set working hours for yourself?  When are you at your creative best, night or day?

I have a totally irregular schedule. I’m not a person who needs structure, and am pretty comfortable with a formless chaos, as long as I have goals within that. I’m most focused at night, when there are no interruptions, but not getting enough sleep is a big problem for me.  

Did you have good handwriting growing up?

I did, because I put a lot energy into it. I had different fonts. I remember writing in my journal when I was eight years old about how I had made a very serious decision to change the way I wrote a lowercase “a”. It was going to have a flat top from that moment onwards. Now I only write in all caps.

The Auerglass performance at Deitch with Glassier was lovely, particularly the underlying theme of co-dependency. The sound of the organ combined with a hushed room created an almost religious atmosphere. Were you raised going to church? Is this the first time you’ve included sound in your work?

I was not raised going to church, but I did go to Catholic school briefly when I was very young. It was not a good experience. It’s interesting that you should ask about religion though, because I’ve been thinking a lot about my own relationship with spirituality. For my whole life, I’ve considered myself a very unspiritual person; rather a very logical and rational one. But now as I learn more about physics, math, and logic, I keep bumping up against the idea of the spiritual: the mystery of everything that exists, where it came from, and how it sort of coagulated into this particular state. I get an almost religiously ecstatic feeling from thinking about things like quantum mechanical mysteries, or infinity, or the beautiful, intricate order in chaotic systems. I guess I’m reevaluating my assumptions that spirituality and rationality are mutually exclusive.

The fold paintings reminded me of Simon Hantai and his “pliage” or folding technique. Were you looking at his work at all?

I wasn’t aware of his work until one of my friends saw my fold paintings and told me to check him out. I loved it. I’m a really big fan of Steven Parrino. Sometimes I think about what I am doing with my fold paintings as sort of a “reverse Parrino.”

Tell me about the glass orbs and entangled particles. I was struck by the poetic nature of this scientific phenomenon. The orb seemed reminiscent of “witches’ balls,” which are believed to ward of evil spirits…

The orb in the entanglement sculpture isn’t so much a ball as it is the suggestion of one, made of three flat disks that intersect with one another. This part of the sculpture hangs from a rod on the outside of the gallery and blows in the wind. Inside the gallery there is a very bright point of light at the end of a rod that moves around in exactly the same way as the black “orb” outside the gallery. It’s almost as if it is possessed: responding to the wind it isn’t even feeling. The piece is based on the phenomenon of entangled particles, which are basically photons that are separate from one another, yet even at a great distance seem to communicate. If you stimulate one, the other will react identically; or when they are faced with random and equally appealing paths, both will always chose the same one.

Tauba Auerbach’s Here and Now/And Nowhere is at Deitch Projects until October 17th.

Top image by Isabel Asha Penzlien. Photos of the show by Mary Manning.