Beautiful Artists/12: Taney Roniger, visual artist

I've known Taney for a few years now, and I've seen her art evolve through various shows. I've always admired how her brilliant, questioning mind creates those perfectly self-contained little worlds that are her paintings.

Cellular Automata Series (Scape #1), 2009
Oil and synthetic polymer on canvas
36" x 70"

In the Artist’s Statement regarding her latest series, Cellular Automata, she writes: "Used primarily by scientists and engineers as a way of visualizing dynamic processes, cellular automata are generated when sets of rules (...) are fed into powerful computers and allowed to run through millions of iterations at high speeds, the whole process being enacted visually on the screen. As the process unfolds, the arrays of “cells” (simple black and white squares) morph into dense fields with complex patterns and configurations that cannot have been foreseen by the initial input. Because of these emergent properties—the strange features that appear wholly unpredicted by the rules—and what they reveal about the structure of complexity and chaos, these images are used in the study of systems (biological, ecological, social, etc.).

Cipher Series (Prisoner's Dilemma #4), 2008
Oil and synthetic polymer on canvas
60" x 40"

Although not created with any aesthetic intent, cellular automata can be seen as richly meaningful and visually compelling landscapes. Each one has its own distinct topography, replete with features suggestive of strange worlds inaccessible to our senses. In addition to being drawn to these images as visualizations of the invisible, I am intrigued by their mechanical/digital origin, as their affinity with “computer space”—the “space” where to an ever-increasing degree we are living our lives—adds another layer to their potential meaning." 

In an essay about her work, written in conjunction with Taney's May 2011 solo exhibition at StandPipe Gallery in New York, Michael Bowen has written: "Cellular Automata would seem on the surface to be a rather sterile, scientific epithet, but the work of Taney Roniger is nothing if not resplendently alive. (...) Striking a nearly impossible balance between the reductive and the complex, her paintings combine artistic mastery with transcendental insight, resulting in an extraordinary gesture of great aesthetic beauty. (...) There is a profoundly spiritual dimension to this outlook, one that is deeply felt in the intimacy of the canvases, which radiate a strong sense of contemplative presence." 

The diptych here on the left, titled Cellscape Codex, is composed by a large sheet of watercolor paper (the right panel) with roughly 4,000 nail holes that are illuminated by two fluorescent lights behind the paper. The left panel shows the same pattern (one of the compositions from the Cellular Automata Series), but was made with common nails nailed into prepared drywall board. The whole installation changes dramatically throughout the day as both the sunlight and the streetlights undergo their daily shifts. At night the whole thing seems to glow from within.
This piece is on show at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. "Expose: Angela Driscoll, Taney Roniger, and Ying Zhu" will be up through the end of January.
 

You can see more of Taney's art on her website, HERE.