Artist Entry: Nikki Graziano

Nikki Graziano is young, very intelligent and very successful in understanding and creating meaningful photographs. Her series that I am particularly interested in is, Found Functions. I honestly cannot remember how it is I stumbled across her artwork but I was very pleased when I did.

Graziano is a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, who has already been blogged by dozens of different websites for this series in particular. She calls herself a photographer and a mathematician but its her clever way of blending her two "selves" that caught my interest.

Also, her images are almost simplifying and attempting to find an understanding of nature's, well...function. And really, thats what her images mean to me -- a glimpse into the mind of scientists trying to understand nature...yet, the equations are so complex that it speaks about the complexity of nature itself.

In explaining her process, she said she "whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph" (Source). Therefore, none of her photos are lies, none of them are coincidental to fitting an found equation -- she actually works everything together.

I've recently become a pretty big Tumblr fan but have restricted my posting because I feel pretty silly when I do. However, I am following a few artists and Graziano is one of them. From there, I was able to pull quotes of her speaking about her work. Other than that, it's been pretty difficult to find more in-depth reporting about her work, which is a shame.

Q: As a mathmatician and an artist, how do you think is the best way to mix both your passions?

A: I don’t really think there’s much of a disconnect between the two (not when you think of the disciplines as two disciplines, rather than how our culture treats them), so I don’t really think it’s too hard to to both.

Q: Why are you obsessed with math? I know it's beautiful and all, but in the end it doesn't solve anything. Life isn't an equation. There are too many variables. You can not solve it, you can only observe and feel.

A: precisely. (the last part)

(Source)