Art review

Posted Tuesday, Mar. 16, 2010

By GAILE ROBINSON

DALLAS -- People have told Adam Silverman and Nader Tehrani their forest of ceramic cones
look like breasts, bombs, bullets, flowers, plant forms and phalluses. When they moved their
sculpture to the Nasher Sculpture Center recently, a visitor approached and told them that they
reminded him of grape hyacinths.

They just smiled.

They are used to hearing, "They look like ...."

Their work seems to invite commentary, and they accept it without offering their own
assessment. "It's important that it not be reducible to a single reading or icon, but that it has
multiple associative meanings," says Tehrani.

Boolean Valley is Silverman and Tehrani's first joint project, and it has been well received at its
past two locations, "They were white box galleries," says Silverman. "One had natural light, one
had no natural light. One place was actually two galleries. We designed it so it could go out in
the world and do different things. It's never been outside, never submerged in water. This is my
favorite so far."

"The generative idea was to marry or investigate the two different sides of their practice, the
handmade intuitive aspect of pottery with the precise technological aspects of architecture," says
Jed Morse, head curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

This is the first time the Nasher has extended an invitation to display a temporary work, and
Morse says that the museum hopes this will lead to regular displays of works by contemporary
sculptors.

One + one = more

Tehrani is a working architect, and Silverman is a ceramicist; they met in architecture school at
the Rhode Island School of Design. Two years ago, they were invited to an arts residency at the
Montalvo Arts Center in Northern California and began work on a piece that they eventually
named Boolean Valley.

"It was important that, at the end of the discussion, we arrived at a place where it wasn't an
architect makes buildings or spatial environments and it's not an artifact, not a big old pot. It had
to be a landscape, something larger than the sum of its parts," says Silverman. (Boolean is a math
term for rationalizing two or more sets, such as what search engines do when seeking a phrase on
the Web.)

It took them months to reach the a-ha moment.

"The easy default was I wanted to play architect, 'Let's make a building out of tile,'" says
Silverman. "When Nader starts a construction project, he investigates the material and
construction methods of a certain region."

So they began with clay forms.

"We looked at versions that looked like plates or rock," Silverman says. "But I felt it was
important that it could be turned. I would sit at a wheel and throw round things."

Bad to the cone

Eventually they settled on a cone. "It's the perfect abstract shape," Silverman says. "Then there
were the brutal economies of this thing. How many can we do? If we can only make 12 or 15, it
wouldn't have had an environmental effect at all. We needed at least 200 or 300. It had to be
landscape scale, not tabletop scale. My arm is 24 inches long and that dictated the size."

He made a cone 2 feet tall by 12 inches across at its base, then cast that basic shape 200 times.
Then he cut the cones.

"Two-inches from the bottom, two-inches from the top and anywhere in between," he says. They
were glazed in a dark iron-gray or cobalt-blue color. "The glazing process was quite volatile. It
does a lot of bubbling and frothing. When it cools, we grind off the top layer of glaze so you see
the bubbles."

The truncated cones are placed in a tight grid of undulating heights. Some of the shallowest are
underwater.

The negative space is as important as the height differences, says Tehrani. "It's about the space
between the pots and how the accumulation of pots renders the environment in different ways."

The work plays in a variety of ways on the Nasher's parklike grounds. The varying heights
reflect the water jets in a neighboring fountain. The dark exterior of the cones mimics the dark
stone of James Turrell's Tending (Blue), the skyspace that is housed in a rough-hewn black
granite box directly behind the fountain, the circular openings of the blue cones suggest the
portholes of the skyspace. The long, horizontal configuration mirrors the planting beds and
makes the cones seem to be an organic element in the landscape.

The temporary piece looks as if it were part of the master plan, making it a very successful -- if
short-lived --addition