Local Screening of Documentary About Lafayette Artist and Amateur Mathematician
Thu, 09/06/2018 - 8:41am
On Thursday, 13 September 2018 (at 7:30 pm) Lafayette based filmmakers Allison Bohl DeHart and Peter DeHart will be screening Bending Lines: The Sculpture of Robert Wiggs at Acadiana Center for the Arts. This film may be of particular interest to people interested in mathematics, science, or art! Within the documentary, the filmmakers interview the pure mathematician Norman W. Johnson to discuss the relationship between his work in mathematics and Wiggs' artwork.
A brief description of the documentary follows. Nearing the end of his life, Lafayette based sculptor Robert Wiggs looks back on a lifelong obsession with patterns. Never formally trained in mathematics, Wiggs studied mud cracks, bee hives, and tree bark to create a geometric system that rivals the work of academic mathematicians, a system which he expressed and explored in scores of sculptures. Bending Lines is a story of obsession, of vision, and of the enduring conversation between art and science. It uncovers an amateur mathematician, obscured by time and his profession, whose artistic work communicates the universal quest to discover the essence of the natural world. Bending Lines had its world premier this April at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Since then it has screened at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm as part of the 2018 BRIDGES Math and Art Conference and has recently received an Impact Doc Award of Merit. In October it will be screening at her New Orleans Films Festival. This film will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers, Allison Bohl DeHart and Peter DeHart.