This project was borne during the time of the worst pandemic of the past century amidst pain and loss, about a man whose good intentions led to one of the most devastating acts of horror of the past century, who spent the last decade of his life trying to ensure that such devastation would not happen again. He was a man who taught us to imagine infinite possibilities. He was not perfect. None of us are.

Over the past month and a half, I’ve started over again, for the fifth time in my adult life. But unlike a clean blank slate, I was able to bring aspects of my past along with me. 

For this project, I’ve stripped out all the meaning from my “Relativity of Time” piece that I created during isolation in NYC, and silenced all the emotions and history from my “E=MC²^⁴” piece. I looked at the cropped photo of my painting of Albert Einstein from isolation as a single atom on which to build something new and created twelve versions of it. I’ve reused these images as building blocks in four distinct ways, each one inspired by Albert Einstein, his life, his works, his words, and his memory.

I invite you to take part in discovering and creating a new dimension of possibilities with me.

To accompany each of these works, I’ve written essays as meditations on the research I did while creating this project. You can read about when Einstein became a symbol, how Einstein inspired artists, and what Einstein thought about the ideas of cooperation and randomness.

We begin rebuilding our lives again with a single atom, a single action, a single good deed.

Ezra Butler

Chicago, Illinois

October 19, 2020