Red Plume, 1982. Acrylic on vinyl and canvas. 2'x10'x2'. Provenance

"Triple Helix" presents a spiral of three sculptors, Jean Grosser, Ralph Williams, and Betty Collings, whose works taken together indirectly address a major cultural task: the reconciliation of art and science. Both fields have gone their separate ways in the last century and a half; each has seemed to offer salvation of one sort or another under its own language. These three artists, however, express more than a casual regard for science, especially mathematics, microbiology, astronomy, and psychology.

Of the three artists, Betty Collings has the most direct contact with the scientific community. Since 1980, her Universe Series, air filled, painted vinyl spirals and eccentric helics, has evolved from a systemic, organic geometry open to permutations and expansions. Collings speaks the language of math and science; she knows and applies systems theory to her artmaking; she also studies her own perceptive and cognitive processes with the deliberation of the experimental psychologist; and she brings all these functions to bear on formulating a philosophic epistomology. Her art, of course, speaks the formal language of shape, color, volume, and rhythm in space, but the works' biomorphic geometries are emblematic of the interdisciplinary synthesis taking place within the artist and of her probing relationship with the culture at large.

…These three artists present a continuum, from Grosser to Williams to Collings, beginning with the intuitive and culminating in the hightly introspective, analytic synthesis of Collings' work. In offering this exhibition to the public, we hold a special hope that viewer with training in mathematics and the sciences will engage in a dialogue with these works and these artists, that they will find a common ground of comparable perceptions."