DCCA: Exhibitions: Carole Bieber & Mark Ham Gallery

SHIFT: Kinetic Sculptures
Carole Bieber and Marc Ham Gallery
September 18, 2009 through November 19, 2009

In the rarefied aura of most museum white cube spaces, voices are hushed and artworks are deemed so precious that they become well-preserved masterpiece ‘pariahs’ ordained to countenance the forbidden touch. Contemporary art, by contrast, opts to be occasionally loud, bold, and alternately inviting and confrontational. The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts celebrates its 30^th anniversary with SHIFT: Kinetic Sculptures, an exhibition that features works that beckon and yield, rock and roll, tinkle and clang, tick and knock, bubble and flow, and start and stop. While these comprise a room full of mechanized objects, the works in the exhibition were selected not so much for the whiz, pop, bang of kinetic art but for a range of movements that capture the poetic, startling, whimsical, subtle, and playful in objects that are astir.

DENNIS BEACH (Wilmington, DE)
Adapting the simple act of blowing bubbles through a straw into a gallery-wide installation, Dennis Beach created a sculpture made of clear acrylic tubing that wraps around the perimeter of the gallery walls. Hung from the ceiling, the tubes contain water that is propelled through the pressure of compressed air. There is something in Flow that is simultaneously industrial and lyrical in form, premise, and effect. One of the more subtle pieces in the exhibition, it intones a quiet presence with the gentle sway of the tubes and the soothing sound of water.

TIMOTHY D. BELKNAP (Philadelphia, PA)
Timothy D. Belknap’s Where did the green go? is a dumpster painted the bright red of fire trucks, warning signs, clowns’ noses, and femme fatale lips. At once inviting and forbidding as well as comic and surreal, a foot pedal bangs a furry mallet on the wall of the steel container and sets underwater blue tubes aglow inside the dumpster. The vibration thrusts model battleships in the water to push against one another: a virtual maelstrom of naval war game in a drum of water. In the most elementary reading, the title might allude to the green of ‘go’ subsumed by the red of ‘stop.’ But it might also reference the disappeared or disappearing green of our natural environment or the green of our struggling economy. Fundamentally playful, it is however neither innocent nor innocuous. As for the tremolo (variation in sound volume) produced, a clang is just a clang but can nonetheless be a kind of alarm or knell.

PAUL DANIEL (Baltimore, MD)
Outside the DCCA, Paul Daniel’s outdoor sculptures share the simplicity, playfulness, and proclivity for primary colors found in Belknap’s dumpster but without either ambiguity or subtext. Lucille Got Legs and Tattletoo operate on the same wind-powered mechanism that propels pinwheels, windmills, and weather vanes. Harnessing the wind, the rotating petal-like, angled, or curved planes activate their environment and the mirrored panels multiply light and sky in the spinning geometric shards of reflections. Daniel sees the strobe of light on architectural surfaces as the mapping of time, with the changing light tracking the earth’s pivot. Presiding over the walkway toward the DCCA, these two works illustrate an economy of means with optimum effect in celebration of form, color, light, atmosphere, and movement—much like the spectacular simplicity of kites or ribbons whipping in the wind.

LILY GOTTLIEB-McHALE (Philadelphia, PA)
Integrating her training both as a visual artist and a cellist, Lily Gottlieb-McHale hoards found materials and vintage objects that she constructs into composites of sculptures to which she adds strings, lights, or bells. Trio (for strings and bells) is comprised of a large wooden chest, a vertical cabinet, and a candelabrum altogether mechanized to ‘perform’ like a large music box. The cavities of the chest and the cabinet serve as echo chambers. Turning Bell Curtain is made of two beams that rotate slowly in opposite directions so that when their paths cross, they set off into a whimsical tinkling a row of miniature bells at the top. Because bells are integral to rituals and mark the auspicious, the momentous, and even the sacred, there is something ceremonial about walking through the curtain.

JAMEY GRIMES (Tuscaloosa, AL)
Motion sensors in museums imply security measures and regulated viewing distances from artworks. Jamey Grimes subverts this arm’s length relationship by employing a motion sensor to animate the viewer-artwork dynamic. Motion activates the flirtatious bobbing to and fro of a wooden disc that sends the thin steel rods anchored to the disc swaying. The dance of shadows cast by the rods conjures wind-blown reeds and the points of contact among the rods cumulatively create a rich sound. A viewer’s approach and presence activates this sonorous sculpture, rendering it a welcoming, playful, and experimental interpretation of a string instrument.

HENRY LOUSTAU (West Grove, PA)
Henry Loustau refers to House with a Good View as “the little house in a vast landscape” that has captured the imagination of many an artist, storyteller, filmmaker, and traveler. House and home are both metaphors and metonyms for notions of place, belonging, memories, departures, and returns. Cast in bronze, the sculpture features an archetypal house with a fence around it that sits atop a globe. Even the lightest touch sets it off in a rocking motion that evokes the maternal, the movement of the earth, and the passage of time. While the worn down treatment of the house and the thick coat of sludge on which it is perched could be read as bleak, it also represents mystery and forbearance.

BILLIE GRACE LYNN (Miami, FL)
The extended hand is a universal symbol of openness and so the exhibition fittingly opens with Billie Grace Lynn’s hand that beckons visitors into the gallery. Disembodied, Red Hand is a lifelike wood carving with small lead weights connected to a contraption of strings and weights. Lynn notes that the piece is tuned like a piano so that it is hypersensitive, mirroring the slightest touch and gesture. While it captures what is tender and poetic in human contact, the deep red stain is intended to connote more disquieting notions of “being caught red-handed or being caught in a lot of red ink—all the debt from borrowing Peter to pay Paul.” Mad Cow Motorcycle, encased in cow bones, is also a political piece that comments on the connections of industrial meat production, excessive consumption, the industry’s dependency on oil, and consequent labor and environmental abuse. Despite its peculiar appearance, the battery-powered motorcycle can actually be driven up to 30 miles per hour.

martinafischer13 (Kassel, Germany)
Machines that take coins are expected to supply products or services such as a candy bar, a phone line, or parking space. martinafischer13’s medicine-cabinet-sized 0002 is enameled the same color as British phone booths and the Red Cross symbol, and takes a quarter to furnish a pause in the constant heartbeat one can hear from it. There is something existentially startling about a vending machine that solicits the temporary suppression of a pulse. Listening to what is clearly a heartbeat, you insert a coin not knowing what to expect and the realization of what you ‘bought’ gives you a chill. But it operates on many levels. The unexpected silence might make you conscious of your own breathing and your own heartbeat. It speaks to the solitude of any environment that has the sound of someone else’s heartbeat plugged in; to rest—from monotony or from life; to relief and hope, when one finds the heartbeat restored; to la petite morte, the French expression for orgasm; to the pause on which simple and complex musical arrangements rely; and to the general rhythm of life itself—our internal metronome .

ASHLEY JOHN PIGFORD (Newark, DE)
In an age of heightened awareness of the need for recycling and in a culture that has heretofore been fed on the idea of infinite material abundance, Ashley John Pigford collects discarded computer hard drives and transforms them into kinetic sculptures. 28,770 Megabytes and Knock Knock Sonic Joke Machine feature exposed hard drives, switches, and wiring on unadorned found wood panels. Their naked physicality makes them interesting objects and their spinning and clicking alludes to the inextricable notion of work they represent. Their condition as discarded hard drives with stored or deleted data suggests a kind of mechanical melancholy but also signals a renewal and transformation in their new incarnation.

While the works in this exhibition certainly demonstrate the technical wizardry of their creators, they also reveal conceptual, political, and philosophical dimensions. With sound and movement, the exhibition elicits smiles, triggers contemplation, and stirs emotions with criticality, generosity, and gratitude.

--Carina Evangelista

Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art

DCCA exhibitions and programs are made possible, in part, through individual contributions, members’ support, and major grants from AstraZeneca, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, the National Endowment for the Arts, and from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.