Yesterday on my way home after work, I popped in to the Nasher Sculpture Center to meet Adam Silverman, who was just wrapping up his work for the day. Silverman (pictured below with Nasher curator Jed Morse) is a potter. He spent all yesterday carefully placing 400 cut clay objects in one of the ponds at the end of the garden. The installation (officially on display tomorrow through June 6) is called Boolean Valley, a project Silverman did with his architect friend Nader Tehrani. You can read more about it here. Here’s what struck me about the piece: imagine trying to make 400 clay objects by hand, such that they form the perfectly even progression that you see below. Anyone who has ever tried to throw a pot in an amateur setting knows how hard it is just to get the thing to approximate “round” — much less have a precise relationship in size to 399 other pots. Yesterday I asked some glib questions of Silverman (Do you like wearing waders? Now that you’re finished, how hard are you gonna party tonight?) when I should have asked him: while making those 400 pieces, how did you keep from going insane?
