Boolean Valley—a collaborative project between potter Adam Silverman and architect Nader Tehrani—is a room-sized installation comprised of 400 cut, clay objects glazed in a colorful compound of cobalt, silicon, and carbide, that together form a topographic sculptural landscape. Tehrani, who uses advanced software and parametric modeling to design some of the most innovative buildings of our time with his firm Office dA, has created a Boolean logic that forms a field or “valley” that is inhabited by Silverman’s striking ceramic objects. Named after the mathematician George Boole, a Boolean logic defines where objects intersect. Commissioned by the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, with independent curator Julie Lazar, Boolean Valley is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art November 8, 2008, through January 11, 2009, and then travels to Montalvo Arts Center from February 1 through March 8, 2009. The exhibition travels to MOCA Pacific Design Center March 22 through July 5, 2009, in a site-specific installation organized by MOCA Curator of Architecture and Design Brooke Hodge for the first exhibition in MOCA’s Craft and Computation series.

Click here to download the Boolean Valley gallery guide.

Boolean Valley is commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center through the 2009 arts initiative AGENCY: The Work of Artists. The initiative is funded in part by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, Nimoy Foundation, and gifts from Mickie and Gibson Anderson, Jo and Barry Ariko, L. J. Cella, Wanda Kownacki and John Holton, Sally and Don Lucas, Judy and George Marcus, and Kathie and Robert Maxfield.

MOCA’s presentation is supported by The Ron Burkle Endowment for Architecture and Design Programs. Additional generous support provided by Jean and John Geresi. In-kind media support is provided by Los Angeles magazine. KCRW 89.9 FM is the Official Media Sponsor of MOCA. Generous support for MOCA Pacific Design Center is provided by Charles S. Cohen.