Why is there something rather than nothing?

Lisa Perez’s current exhibit, still even now, at the 5 Traverse Gallery is a meditative study in being and nothingness. The exhibit consists of small sculptural installations made of paper and wood. Her designs are poetic. They simplify the physical world without belittling it. Her best pieces are simultaneously microscopic and macroscopic. Organic grids and delicate squares cast shadows onto the gallery walls. These shadows define the physicality of each piece and in doing so aestheticize them. Yes, defined and aestheticized by shadows, which is to say defined and aestheticized by death and/or nothingness. Death is indeed the mother of all beauty, and thus the exhibit poses Heidegger’s famous question (paraphrased by Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”): Why is there something rather than nothing? How strange it is.

Perez responds to the question with an elegant boldness. Her perspective is multifarious, but she does not reduce the physical world to chicken-shit relativism. Her answer is this — there is neither nothing nor something (triple negative?). There is everything and it happens all at once, from every angle, from every standpoint. (More after jump.)

5 Traverse Gallery, exhibit runs through November 22, 5 Traverse Street

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Paper sculptor, Kirsten Hassenfeld, will speak tonight at the Bell Gallery at Brown, presumably to discuss her insanely gorgeous installation of giant, lacy, illuminated paper baubles, trinkets and bibelots. . . and where to buy really good scissors.  Also on display are several of her fanciful and glossy, blue and white sculptures — if Gaudi took a trip to Delft by way of a coffee shop in Amsterdam — which the gallery insists are made of paper but your eyes will tell you otherwise. (And yes, she is a distant relative of the ‘My Little Pony’ Hassenfelds.) This installation is up through November 1, with additional works through November 14 in her New Works: Sculpture and Drawings at Cade Tompkins Editions/Projects at 189 Hope Street.

Artist’s lecture and reception 5:30pm, Friday, Bell Gallery, College Street