In the Shadow of Numbers accompanies a survey exhibition and collects for the first time new writings and images on the influential Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines (born 1944). Gaines investigates the relationships between aesthetic experience, political beliefs and the formation of meaning. His work over the last 40 years has typically employed systems and rule-based procedures to explore how we experience and derive meaning from art. Although Gaines is often linked with Conceptual artists of the 1960s, he identifies more closely with John Cage s examinations of indeterminacy in both composition and performance. The book includes an extensive selection of images of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video from several bodies of Gaines s work over the last several decades.