The Pomona College Museum of Art is pleased to present In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975-2012 in collaboration with Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College. Based in Los Angeles, Gaines investigates the relationships between aesthetic experience, political beliefs, and the formation of meaning. His work over the last forty years has typically employed systems and rule-based procedures to explore how we experience and derive meaning from art. Gaines is often linked with early Conceptual artists who came to prominence in the 1960s questioning subjectivity and traditional formal and material concerns. However, he identifies more closely with John Cage’s examinations of indeterminacy in both composition and performance and focuses on linguistic tools such as metaphors and metonyms.
In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975-2012 represents the first collaboration between the Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College. The exhibition consists of photographs, sculptures, video, and drawings from several bodies of Gaines’s work over the last several decades, including the “Explosions,” “History of Stars,” “NIGHT/CRIMES,” “Shadows,” and “Walnut Tree Orchard” series, among others, presented at the two Claremont College venues. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes writings by the artist, Michael Ned Holte, Ciara Ennis, and Rebecca McGrew. This exhibition is Project Series 43.
