John Sims’s video
The SquareRoots of the Master Quilt: Poetic Reflections by Johannes-Curtis Schwarzenstein

Featured in the Summer 2009 issue of Fiberarts, conceptual-math artist John Sims has found a variety of ways to express the complex nature of geometry through the tactile symmetry of quilts. This fall a video and sound installation of his performance-art alter ego, Afro-German-Jewish poet Johannes-Curtis Schwarzenstein, will be presented at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The video component of this exhibit, a poetic form of Sims’s philosophy on math concepts as they relate to nature and art (spoken in German with English subtitles), will be projected onto one of his pi quilts. As in all of the Sims’s work, this multi-media presentation explores the concept that art exists on the same plane as math and science—that mathematics is a core fiber for the creative process, providing a structure to articulate metaphysical, political, and morally charged ideas. Here we share his video The SquareRoots of the Master Quilt: Poetic Reflections by Johannes-Curtis Schwarzenstein.