Raymond Carter
Irregular Polygons
October 25th – November 11th, 2023
In 1884, Edwin Abbott Abbott published his satirical, mathematical novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, an adventure narrated by a Square using a world (Flatland) of two-dimensions to describe the social absurdities of Victorian England. He created a land populated by regular geometric figures: women as segments of a line while men are various regular polygons – the more sides, the higher their status. A Square imagines a one-dimensional world of points and line but can’t convince his King. Later, he is visited by a Sphere who eventually reveals the third-dimension opening his mind to the existence of a fourth and higher spatial dimensions. The population of Flatland evolves from simple geometric shapes (the craftsmen and gentlemen) to more complex multi-sided shapes (the nobility), to the priests as circles. Irregular polygons are disruptive and treated with suspicion because of their deformities. A Square is “not convinced … that the toleration of Irregularity is compatible with the safety of the State. If … allowed to exist and to propagate a still more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life?” An early science fiction classic, by imagining the confrontations between different dimensions, Abbott exploits the analogy between human frailty and his 2-D characters. This series of paintings began as an attempt to disrupt my visual language and examine real non-objective space within the constraints of an irregular polygon.
