Optic Nerve.(innovations of abstract artist Tauba Auerbach)

Byline: DODIE KAZANJIAN Photographed by Raymond Meier

Math, science, and fashion all play a role in the innovations of abstract artist Tauba Auerbach.

The entire point of making art, to me, is newness," says Tauba Auerbach, "and to expand your mind, even in some tiny way." A 27-year-old San Francisco native who recently moved to downtown Manhattan, Auerbach has been attracting notice with her fresh and surprising reinventions of abstraction, in which conceptual puzzles play new tricks on the mind's eye.

Her 50/50 Floor, with 100,000 black-and-white tiles laid down in random order, wowed viewers at last summer's "Constraction" show at Deitch Projects, which represents her in New York. At the moment, she's working with holograms, cast-resin sculptures, paintings based on crumpled paper, and the problem of "collapsing order and chaos into a unified state."

The only child of theater designers who have created the mechanical stages for several Cirque du Soleil productions, Auerbach knew she wanted to be an artist "from the second I thought about it," she tells me. Instead of going to art school, though, she studied fine arts at Stanford and took a lot of math and science courses. "I thought it was better for me to know about a lot of things, not just to focus on art." For three years she worked as a sign painter. "Being around letters every day started an aesthetic fascination with words and springboarded me into what I've been doing ever since," she says. Her first significant works were large (50 by 38 inches), intricately calligraphic drawings, black India ink on paper, of letters of the alphabet, in which each letter hovers on the edge of decipherability. "To think that 26 little things are the building blocks for so much," she says, "that you can reduce all ...