Madonnas of Science

By Ben • art, religion • 29 May 2013

Chris Shaw, the artist, describes these works:

"As an artist I’m intrigued with the the way icons present their ideas – an eas­ily under­stood, blunt cen­tral image jux­ta­posed with deep sym­bol­ism and cryp­tic geo­met­ric foun­da­tions. Icons also have a rea­son for exist­ing, they are con­vey­ers of information.

The mod­ern icons I cre­ate also con­vey infor­ma­tion, it could be a sci­en­tific con­cept, a polit­i­cal state­ment, or a pop-culture ref­er­ence. Regard­less, each icon has a story and a rea­son for existing.

In this body of work I use the Madonna as the vehi­cle to lit­er­ally carry the ideas I’ve cho­sen to por­tray. The titles are straight for­ward. How­ever, under­ly­ing and obfus­cated by the image is a rigid geo­met­ric base, over which the Madonna icon is con­structed. The geom­e­try within this base is a rid­dle to deci­pher as are many of the sym­bols within.

I’ve mainly learned about hid­den geom­e­try and sym­bol­ism in art by decon­struct­ing an art­works com­po­si­tion, then research­ing what I find, some­thing I like to do for fun. Golden ratios, spi­rals, and fibonacci sequences are eas­ily found in many types of art, but espe­cially deeply woven into icons. How and why this geo­met­ric lan­guage was used fas­ci­nates me, it ulti­mately led to cre­at­ing my own icons with their own meanings."

by Chris Shaw,
via Neatorama

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