Ideas Without Edges

Christopher Badger

August 25 - December 2, 2023

Gallery Reception: September 30, 5 - 8 p.m.

A site-specific installation of artwork bridging gaps between the siloed departments of a college campus.

Chemical Painting, Computational Choreography, Psychological Color Theory, Sculpture as a Model of Physical Phenomena, Mathematical composition of the picture plane. 

The artworks on display are all responses to assignments and prompts that Chris Badger gives to his students in his Santa Monica College courses on Design, Color Theory, Digital Media, Contemporary Art, and Creative Coding. The works in the exhibition are curriculum, and they serve as demonstrations of some ways that the study of art and design can open onto a wide array of other fields including Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. 

Badger studied New Genres in the Fine Arts Department at Otis college of Art and Design, receiving a BFA in 2005, and then an MFA in 2008 from the Roski School of Art at the University of Southern California. He has exhibited work at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Various Small Fires, The Wattis Institute, The Detroit Museum of Art, on other galleries in the U.S. as well as Europe. From 2009 – to 2018 Badger taught a series of special seminars at Otis Collage of Art on topics such as Systems Thinking, Speculative and Esoteric Musics, SUPEREXUBERANCE, Omni-Dimensional Phenomena, and Wilderness as Myth and Metaphore. He has served as Professor of Art and Design at Santa Monica College since 2015.