Math Bass: Crowd Rehearsal

Math Bass’s work encompasses painting, sculpture, video, and performance. Bass grew up in a Jewish home, regularly attending temple, where ceremonies, rituals, and text influenced her predilection for the shrouding, pictographs, and repetition that infuse Crowd Rehearsal.

The two paintings are part of a series begun in 2012. Each shares a title whose letters—N, E, W, and Z—can be rotated to form Z, W, M, and N. These small shifts turn a comprehensible word into a collection of random letters and highlight the instability and mutability of meaning.

Math Bass was born in New York in 1981 and lives and works in Los Angeles.