We have bound ourselves by Cartesian constraints—the rooms we inhabit, the skyscrapers we work in, the grid-like arrangement of our streets. Yet outside our boxes, the natural world teems with swooping and crenellated forms, from the frilled surfaces of lettuce and kelp to the animal undulations of coral reefs. Refusing to play by Euclidean rules, nature embraces instead a hyperbolic mode of excess.

Taking a cue from corals, the Institute For Figuring has been pioneering a new kind of art practice that is inherently organic, open-ended, and collective. By building on the germ of a mathematical idea, the Institute and its contributors have evolved a world of fantastical handicrafted reefs populated by a taxonomy of whimsical, invented species. This wildly feminine construction, resulting from a collaboration between geometry, biology, and participatory art practice, also has its roots in our ecological consciousness.

At once hyper-real, super-real, and unreal, the exhibition Hyperbolic: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason, serves as a domestically inflected meditation on the mystery of mathematics, the evolution of life, the well-spring of human creativity, and the environmental crisis confronting marine ecosystems everywhere.