This exhibition marks the premiere of a new body of work by NYUAD faculty member Sandra Peters. The artist was inspired by the architecture of Rudolph Schindler whose work eventually led her in to a deep study of the geometric permutations of a cube.

Pandora’s Box includes a series of eleven uniquely unfolded aluminum cube sculptures and a wall mural spanning 4.4 meters. Ten of the eleven sculptures are identical in color. The eleventh, Pandora’s box, is an inviting silver. Peters’ use of mathematical imagining, abstract geometry and simplicity of form generates a minimalist effect. The link between each work in the exhibition reiterates Peters’ almost obsessive and calculated patterns, with each cube being a transformation of another, and the mural being an unfolded execution of the silver Pandora’s box.

An added pattern emerges within the painted mural: the eleven unfolding executions found in each of sculptures in the show. In a kind of mathematical fantasy these modular forms, in turn, can fit together, puzzle-like, to make a single, large, hypothetical cube that the artist invites the viewer to imagine. Thus, the mural, in two dimensions, embodies a map for a three-dimensional sculpture.

Throughout the exhibition period, Peters will change both the placement and the orientation of the cubes in the space, turning the cubes into as Peters says, “nomadic objects that travel.” The artist clearly calculated every aspect of this exhibit, and at first glance it may seem rigid, yet once visited and experienced, the show demonstrates, in the end, a genuine fluidity and ability to change.

— Bana Kattan, Assistant Curator, NYUAD Arts Gallery

To view a time-lapse of the making of the Untitled mural, please go to: https://vimeo.com/153087852