“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern.” The genealogy of this quote—from WilliamBlake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—usually leads from Blake to Aldous Huxley to the Doors, following a lineage spiritual, scientific, and psychedelic. Huxley’s experiment begins as a scientific study of the effects of mescaline, but the awareness that he relates transcends the calculations of science into an experience both human and spiritual. But rather than taking us on an acid trip, the work of Devin Powers takes us, in other ways, to the next dimension.
Made as wall drawings, installations and works on paper, Devin Powers' hypercubes and n-dimensional cubes attempt to visualize a world outside of our grasp. Thinking of the world in terms of three dimensions is simply of the most practical use for us. If a square is the second dimension, and the cube the third, then the hypercube is the fourth. The works on paper and wall drawings seem to stretch to infinite complexity and the sculptures hint with bright colors and intersecting right angles that the boundaries as we know them are merely illusory. Powers translates the sterile algorithms of mathematics into handmade, near mystical experiments of visual representation, revealing the potential and possibility hiding in all things. Exploring the mystery spaces beneath accepted perception of reality, Powers reports back with the strange and wonderful possibilities of another dimension.
