How is meaning constructed? This is a question that drives the L.A.-based artist Charles Gaines. “My work is about the investigation of language as a subject,” Gaines says in the 2015 book Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life, “and how language itself informs the way we understand the world.” In a wide-ranging oeuvre that draws from mathematical, photographic, linguistic, and notational systems, Gaines investigates relationships. How can music be portrayed as sculpture? How can a video become a drawing? This exhibition presents Gaines’s early experiments from the 1970s and 80s, in which mathematically determined grids and numerical notations are extracted from photographs. —E.C.