Lewis Alquist, Tom Denlinger, Gregory Green, Bill Harding, John Pakosta, and Susan Wexler.
Featured Artists
Curated by Randy Alexander, Reliable Machines featured work that used Kinetic art as an encompassing theme for the variety of materials and concepts used by the artists in the exhibition. The artworks in the exhibition incorporated both a fine art aesthetic alongside technological traditions, while using everyday objects to advert the real and create a narrative specific to the artists own assertions.
Mixed media, and performance artist Bill Harding presented a piece entitled The Drum Cycle, which invited the viewer to mount and pedal a stationary bicycle that activated a drum mechanism that produced multiple-phase rhythm patterns. Harding is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute.
Artist Gregory Green exhibited two wall-mounted reliefs consisting of circular saw blades and light bulbs that were activated by foot pedals attached to power cords. As the pedals were depressed, the blades spun and the lights threw off a blinding flash. The work addressed the power of politics and the nature of painting. Green a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has shown throughout the country since 1980. He is also a performance artist whose spectacle/performances deal with assault, destruction and the potential for the mutual annihilation of both.
Susan Wexler exhibited a black-light glow-in-the-dark fountain that mechanically sprayed a stream of phosphorescent water. The piece had a Surreal quality that derived from her previous performance work in which she presented glow-in-the-dark environments. Susan Wexler is a graduate of SAIC. She has preformed throughout the country, including Hal Bromm Gallery and Franklin Furance in New York. She preformed a live glow-in-the-dark Jello wrestling match at Randolph Street Gallery for the Sex, Death, and Jello exhibition.
Tom Delinger a graduate of SAIC, presented a mechanistic garbage can ensemble entitled Cupid Chastised, which was depicted as the unholy alliance of science and lust.
Artist John Pakosta presented a piece entitled Intition (Assimilation of the irrational By reason, Effects a Reciprocal Reorganization of Rationalities Domain)…(field Series No. 3), a construction of gold-leaf, plastic tubes, flowers, and air-generating mechanisms that explored and exploited various levels of energy both actual and virtual. In the piece the differences and similarities between the interacting systems was apparent. John Pakosta received a degree in Microbiology from Arizona State University, and an MFA from SAIC.
Lewis Alquist‘s piece Sleeping Mutation was a piece composed of a geiger counter, radioactive plate (Fiestaware), and an emu egg. The Emu egg (from the extinct Emu bird) was bombarded by radioactive emissions from the uranium glaze of the Fiestaware plate. The plate sat on top a geiger counter pedestal that crackled and read thousands of particle-counts per minute. Lewis Alquist graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Florida Atlantic University.
