West Coast Biennial

The West Coast Biennial is a juried exhibition at Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, California, open to artists living in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. It has run since 2011, and the 2025 edition was the eighth. Entrants could submit up to three works made within the previous three years, and the juror was asked to bring back somewhere between thirty and fifty of them.

Three hundred and thirty-four pieces were entered. Dr. Robyn G. Peterson, director of the Museum of Riverside, selected forty-seven, by forty-four artists. The show opened on January 31, 2025 and ran until May 11.

Singularity was one of them. To be singular simply means to fail to be smooth, and there are many ways a variety can do so: a cusp, a node, a cross-cap, or the union of pieces of differing dimension. The work hangs as a group of panels, one type to each.

Drawing them is the hard part, because a singular point is exactly where the usual machinery gives up. There is no surface normal at a cusp and no well-behaved mesh through a self-crossing. So the piece is rendered straight from the defining polynomial: the renderer estimates its distance to the surface by linearizing the gradient and shortens its steps as that estimate degrades, which happens precisely as it approaches the singular point. The surface stays sharp at the place where it stops being a surface.

It belongs to a series working through the range of singular behavior in dimension three. The whole piece now hangs in my office at the University of San Francisco.