Machine Learning

Curated by Matthew Deleget

Boyden Gallery
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
St. Mary’s City, Maryland

September 4-28, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007, 6-8pm

The Boyden Gallery of St. Mary’s College of Maryland is pleased to announce the group exhibition Machine Learning, featuring New York City-based artists Henry Brown, Terry Haggerty, Gilbert Hsiao, and Douglas Melini.  The exhibition is curated by Matthew Deleget, artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE in Brooklyn, New York.

The title of the exhibition, Machine Learning, is inspired by a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with the development of algorithms that allow computers to “learn”.  Machine learning recognizes patterns within massive sets of information and has a wide range of real-world applications, the most ubiquitous of which is the Internet search engine.

The exhibition Machine Learning examines the relationship between abstraction and the information age, and presents four artists making new forms of pattern-based painting. The exhibition raises multiple questions.  How has pattern-based abstraction responded to the overwhelming presence of the Internet?  What are abstract artists’ core concerns with every conceivable type of information now available at the click of a button?  How has pattern-based abstraction digested the appearance, logic, and behavior of the Internet, the very tool that informs it?

In addition to presenting works by Brown, Haggerty, Hsiao, and Melini, the exhibition will also draw from the college’s permanent collection and include related works by precedent artists.  At the conclusion of the The Boyden Gallery show, the exhibition will travel to The Painting Center (www.thepaintingcenter.org) in New York, NY, and Gallery Sonja Roesch (www.gallerysonjaroesch.com) in Houston, TX.  A catalog will accompany the exhibition.

The Boyden Gallery
The Boyden Gallery has hosted more than 170 exhibitions since it was founded in 1971.  The gallery’s name honors American landscape painter Dwight Frederic Boyden (1860-1933), winner of a gold medal at the Salon of Paris in 1900 and father of long-time St. Mary’s College Board of Trustees member, Mrs. Aurine Boyden Morsell.

Over the decades, exhibitions have included works by noted historical figures represented in the permanent collection including Jean Arp, Oskar Kokoschka, Marc Chagall, Theodore Stamos, Andy Warhol, Richard Lindner and Red Grooms, and international contemporary works from the Republic of Georgia, Estonia, China, Japan, Latin America, and Africa.

To further broaden the scope of exhibitions, the gallery works with guest curators and hosts traveling exhibitions from such respected organizations as Maryland Art Place and the Organization of American States Museum of the Americas.

Finally, the gallery provides students an opportunity to examine first-hand, works by faculty mentors such as Sue Johnson, Colby Caldwell, and Lisa Scheer, and visiting faculty including Ledelle Moe and Elijah Gowin.  In the spring of each year, the gallery gives St. Mary’s College students their first professional art exhibition experience with a series of student exhibitions.

MINUS SPACE
Founded in 2003 by artists Matthew Deleget and Rossana Martinez, MINUS SPACE is a curatorial project based in Brooklyn, New York, presenting the most innovative reductive art by international artists working in all media.  Reductive art is generally characterized by its use of plainspoken materials, monochromatic or limited color, geometry and pattern, repetition and seriality, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor.

MINUS SPACE presents four exhibitions annually in its Brooklyn project space, as well as an online log publishing comprehensive information about reductive art on the international level.MINUS SPACE also provides a directory of affiliated artists, publishes a comprehensive chronology of events concerning the development of reductive art, lists and links to related texts and exhibitions currently on view, and presents a comprehensive directory of links to related web sites.

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