Coming Saturday, March 14, on Pi Day 2015, OZ Arts brings together visual art, live performance, and discussion with a focus on the connections of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Since its establishment last year, OZ Arts Nashville has broken a path for installations and performances spanning art forms, including music, theater, dance and visual art in various mediums.
Pi Day will showcase the conceptual artworks of multiple visual artists including its founder, Cano Ozgener, whose Pi Synesthesia uses color to express the mathematical constant. Also on display are photographs from Ben Davis’s Pi in the Sky, the world’s largest ephemeral installation of pi. Roy Wooten, with an ensemble, will perform his score for the constant, and artists and scholars, including Laurie Anderson, will come to OZ Arts from across the country to discuss the intersection of mathematics and art.
Doors for Pi Day 2015 at OZ Arts will open at 9:26 am on Saturday, March 14. (3.14 15 926—get it?). After opening remarks, North Carolina-based, mathematics-inspired arts educator Mark Hanf will deliver a brief multimedia introduction to pi. Then a panel discussion in which a variety of luminaries will talk about the intersection of art and science in their work follows, with Hanf; Laurie Anderson, one of America’s most consistently daring creative pioneers and NASA’s first and only ever artist-in-residence; Roy Wooten, five-time Grammy-winning percussionist and composer; Cano Ozgener, visual artist and the founder of OZ Arts Nashville; and Mark Rowan, President of Griffin Technology, the industry-leading consumer electronics company headquartered in Nashville.
Pi Day is a return to origins for OZ Arts, whose founding grew out of an epiphany that Cano Ozgener had about the healing power of the arts, while he was ill with cancer. In art making, Ozgener found spiritual and mental nourishment to balance his physical frailty, and a way to channel his lifelong fascination with math and numbers, especially pi. Ozgener also finds synesthesia compelling, i.e. the ability of some to sense that specific numbers have associated specific colors. The works in Ozgener’s Pi Synesthesia series display varying shapes, and collections of shape, coded by the specific color that Ozgener has chosen for that numeral in the constant (3.1415…): yellow for three, red for one, brown for four, red for one, light blue for five, and so on.
Throughout Pi Day, visitors can take in a range of visual art installations, including more than a dozen paintings and sculptures Ozgener created in collaboration with OZ Arts artists-in-residence Brian Somerville and Jammie Williams. Hanf will guide audience members in the creation of sculptures onsite throughout the day. At 1pm, backed by a 17-member ensemble, Nashville-based artist Roy Wooten will perform the world premiere of Pi and the Circle of Harmony, his musical score for the pi constant.
Food and beverages from Music City Pie Co., Crankees Pizzeria, Feisty Goat Coffee and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams will be available for purchase. OZ Arts Nashville is located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville. Tickets, $20, can be purchased at www.oznashville.com.
