Arthur Ganson
Arthur Ganson has been making kinetic sculpture for over thirty years, having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. A former artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he currently maintains an ongoing exhibition of sculpture at the Gestural Engineering exhibit at MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has been and is currently exhibited in galleries and museums in both the United States and Europe.
His work examines the quiet drama of physical motion, whether driven by a motor or by the actions of the viewer. Notions of balance, of rising and falling, of action and reaction and consequence, play themselves out in such materials such as wire, concrete, steel, and artichoke petals.
Self-described as a cross between a mechanical engineer and a choreographer, Ganson observes, "We read objects in motion on both the objective and subjective levels; a machine may be about fabric or grease, but it may also be about thick liquid and sensuous movement. A bit deeper, it may be about meditation or the sense of release. And taken yet another step, it may be about pure invention and the joyfulness in the heart of its creator."
Harvey Blume, in The Atlantic, wrote, "Ganson's work isn't ruled by a clockwork philosophy; it is open to whatever truths about life and motion his wires, motors, oil, and chains will lend themselves to. His pieces are not, like de Vaucanson's duck, scrupulous mechanical copies of living things, but are instead suggestive -- or, as Ganson puts it, "gestural," frequently grounded in biological and bodily processes but never limited to them."
Moving objects are playfully linked by intention and subject in A Child and a Ball, which entails an active child mesmerized by a moving ball. In Machine with Wishbone, a real chicken wishbone pulls the very mechanism responsible for its movement. Another sculpture writes the word "Faster" as it is pushed. Other works explore the nature of oiled surfaces, object manipulation, slow explosions, and the organic implications of slow moving roller chain.
His work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Time Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe and the Atlantic Monthly Unbound. A short profile was produced by WGBH television in Boston and included in the series Nova: Science Now. He has also appeared as a cartoon bear on the children's cartoon series Arthur, also produced by WGBH. He is the inventor of the award-winning children's toy Toobers and Zots and is a partner in the toy company HandsOnToys which he co-founded in 1994.
Ganson has held residencies in science museums, collaborated with the Studebaker Movement Theatre, and been featured in solo shows at MIT Museum, Harvard’s Carpenter Center, the DeCordova Museum, and the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York. He has a permanent installation at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Elizabeth King
Elizabeth King combines precisely movable figurative sculptures with stop-frame animation in works that blur the perceptual boundary between actual and virtual object. Intimate in scale -- a theater for an audience of one -- and made to solicit close looking, the work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature's host of legends in which the artificial figure comes to life.
Her work is represented by Danese Gallery in New York, and is in permanent collections nationwide including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Dartmouth, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Awards for her work include a 2006 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2002-03 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, now the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College in the spring of 2008.
A mid-career retrospective of her work entitled "The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye," curated by Ashley Kistler, opened in late 2007 at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond in Virginia, and then traveled to Dartmouth College, the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, and the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. The exhibition catalog includes essays by Nancy Princenthal, Amy Hauft, and Ashley Kistler.
Her book, Attention's Loop (A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit) was published by Harry Abrams in 1999. She is currently finishing a second book, written with co-author W. David Todd of the Smithsonian Institution: a study of a Renaissance automaton in the Smithsonian collection and the legend behind it, entitled A Machine, a Ghost, and a Prayer: The Story of a Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk. The monk is the subject of a shorter essay, "Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays" included in the 2007 volume Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life edited by Jessica Riskin (University of Chicago Press).
King received BFA and MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute. Since 1985 she has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media.