MIT Alum's six newly installed paintings seek to investigate, inspire

Todd Siler’s six-painting series, “A.R.T.strings,” newly installed along the Picower Institute’s main third-floor corridor, investigates the myriad connections between the brain and nature both as we experience them and as we understand them.

Broadly encompassing in their representations, the works are tethered to objective phenomena yet unconstrained in their inspiration, message and form. In presenting the series, Siler spells out art as an acronym standing for “All Representations of Thought” and he couples neuroscience and cognition with reference to nature at its most fundamental and universal level, the multidimensional physics “string theory” of everything.

Above: Artist Todd Siler holds his painting 'Drumming Primordial Rhythms of the Cosmos' on the wall of the Picower Institute's third-floor corridor as an installer consults on its placement.

A man in a baseball cap wearing a blue latex glove levels a painting on a wall — An installer puts the finishing touches on the placement of 'Surging Anxiety: The Painted Wall at Black Canyon'

In each painting, Siler intertwines many conceptual dimensions. Consider the fifth in the series, “Surging Anxiety: ‘The Painted Wall’ at Black Canyon,” inspired by the overwhelming wonder he felt amid the towering Colorado landform. Siler represents different scales of natural forms – features of the canyon, such as a gravely patch along the river bed, and the brain, such as the four axon terminals that slant down the canvas like the canyon walls. In the context of a chasm carved over eons, he captures feelings and memories formed within seconds. Like time and the canyon’s spatial vastness, the complex information of the canyon is compressed within the brain, and in Siler’s painting emotion is too: The vertically stretched word “anxiety” lies nestled among the axon terminals, as if anticipating a chance discovery.

Similarly the first painting in the series, “Cerebral Flares of Unfathomable Influences,” mixes printed and painted media to abstract parallels between diverse natural phenomena: solar flares and surges of feeling. Siler calls this connection “Processmorphology: the comparative study of processes in like and unlike systems.”

As physical forms, the paintings exhibit a free sense of inquiry. They are neither framed nor regularly quadrilateral and the materials venture outward from the canvas, often with a delicate sculpturing that allows them to move with the ambient air.

A painting on the wall, shaped like the state of Washington, suggests a solar theme with bright yellow hues and circular forms — 'Cerebral Flares of Unfathomable Influences'

Siler has been inspired by the brain, particularly as the source of creativity and innovation, since childhood and has long made it the central theme of his art. The people, scholarship and technologies he encountered at MIT, where he became the first visual artist to earn a PhD in 1986, continue to influence his work as well. A.R.Tstrings accompanies an earlier installation of his works at the Picower Institute.

A.R.Tstrings comes to Picower as a donation from Siler’s longtime friend D.A. Duke, on behalf of the Duke Family of Denver. Siler said he is excited that his art exists in intimate intersection with the daily work of MIT neuroscientists.

“The art is meant to be catalytic and to cultivate the kind of innovative thinking that happens when someone is walking on the way from one place to another and stops to 'Artgaze'---suddenly realizing: I never thought about art and the brain that way,” he said. “That starts the 'ArtScience' process of creative-critical thinking about the bigger picture of their work, and other things they could add or relate that might enrich their research.”