John Noestheden’s Signal and Echo works represent a unique standalone series within the artist’s celebrated Diamond Drawings.

Where many of the Diamond Drawings incorporate randomized procedures to create compositions referencing star formations, in the Signal and Echo pieces, Noestheden explores the possibilities of the grid as a structure through which he can introduce variation and unpredictability.

Meticulously plotted out in pencil, whose intersecting lines provide the nexus points for the application of the artist’s Swarovski silver crystals, each work is rooted in mathematical structure: grids, geometric patterns, and repeating shapes. As always, the crystals’ ability to refract light creates a dynamic and playful viewer experience, one the artist further manipulates through the employment of varying crystal sizes, both interior to the grids and in overall blocks of form.

The titles Signal and Echo evoke the search for meaning and the potential for communication with the cosmos. While the grids embody the methodical mapping of scientific enquiry, the variations in the crystals’ geometric patterns and the randomized light reflections from their multifaceted surfaces, in turn, promise pattern within the chaos. “Messages arrive as pulses, reverberations, and distortions, hinting at knowledge we can sense but not yet decode”, writes the artist.

Of course, much of the light we receive from the cosmos is traveling millions of light years from stars that may no longer exist. Noestheden’s works manifest this poetic quality of light as fleeting afterimage, temporal and contingent, a universe that continues to speak through its echoes.

“These lingering impressions speak to the persistence of memory and time: the shimmer of existence that continues after disappearance.”

John Noestheden was born in Amsterdam in 1945 and moved to Canada in 1952. He received a BFA from the University of Windsor and an MFA from Tulane University, New Orleans. In 1990 the artist accepted a position at the University of Regina teaching sculpture and drawing, and since 2010, has been living and working in Ontario. He has had over thirty solo exhibitions internationally, and his work is represented in Canadian and U.S. museums, as well as public and private collections.

View the exhibition online here:
https://www.artnet.com/galleries/jhb-gallery/signals-echoes