Demons and Particles at the Moody Center for the Arts
From "The Demon in the Diagram" by Matthew Ritchie, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve watched conceptual art become increasingly multivalent and more accomplished, in terms of bring together multiple disciplines. If Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was the initial point of departure for modern/post-modern works, then installations like Matthew Ritchie’s “The Demon in the Diagram” is an example of one of the points of arrival. On view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Ritchie’s installation is an immersive experience of the shifting sands of interpreting, describing, and diagramming existence in the world and how reality will win out over our strategies to encapsulate it in words/images. Each strategy we devise to formulate some structure of reality is altered by successive interpretations. Ritchie begins with Hesiod and the adoption of mythology to construct a meaningful interpretation of human experience and c...