Visitors to artist Gregory Barsamian's exhibition at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland will likely notice something remarkable even before they set foot in a gallery. To host Unbelievable Transformations, an unusual showcase of kinetic sculpture, the museum's airy exhibition spaces have been painted charcoal gray and plunged into darkness. Entering them requires stepping behind a black curtain, as if visiting a magician's lair.
What's inside could well pass for magic to anyone who's never seen a zoetrope in three dimensions. (It's not exactly a popular art form, perhaps due to the tremendous precision fabrication requires. Pixar created an elaborate one based on its popular Toy Story movie for a 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.) Small sculptures — a running man, a crumpled ball of paper, a grimacing head — spin rapidly around a machine base. As a strobe light hits them in the darkness, the objects and figures appear to come to life, like a stop-motion animation in real space.
If you're prone to motion sickness or sensitive to strobes, the sensation might be overwhelming, but for most people, Barsamian's art will just inspire a sense of delighted bewilderment. On Friday, Polk Museum of Art curator Todd Behrens and exhibits specialist Gregory Mills will treat visitors to an unveiling of the sculptures, turning off the machinery that powers them and turning on the house lights for a peek at their illusionistic workings.
But just because you can get a look at the sculptures' technical guts doesn't mean you'll be any closer to cracking their elusive meanings. Working with simple but evocative themes in his art, Barsamian deliberately leaves the door open for ambiguity and interpretation. "My main focus is my unconscious life, so I record dreams and keep them logged," he says.
Each of the pieces on display creates the illusion of a transformation that would be impossible in reality. In one of the most entrancing sculptures, "Untitled" (1999), an artist at his drawing desk — represented as a flat image — appears to crumple and throw a wad of paper through the two-dimensional picture plane into a three-dimensional room. Through a series of spinning dioramas, Barsamian fills the "room" with paper balls that wriggle, bounce and dissolve. Whether the result suggests a metaphor for the frustrations of creative process or a whimsical play on animating the inanimate, the sculpture's imagery lingers long after an initial viewing. Another piece, "Forty," conveys a relatable feeling: Created to commemorate the artist's milestone birthday, the sculpture animates a birthday cake bursting into a Medusa head. Suspended from the gallery ceiling, its mesmerizing repetition induces visitors to hang around for a while. A third piece (of five total in the exhibition) places a miniature man striding along the edge of a saw blade, while another animates a series of altered postcards. (Think 1950s tourist kitsch reprogrammed with ironic commentary on contemporary culture.)
To play their tricks, Barsamian's sculptures depend on the persistence of vision, the phenomenon by which the brain reads discontinuous (but rapidly sequenced) images as a continuous flow. The machine-powered sculptures spin at a rate of 12 frames per second, half the rate of film projection, which relies on the same optical operation. At that speed, Barsamian says, he's able to convey in a symbolic, visual language something that would take much longer (or perhaps be impossible) to evoke as strikingly with words and conscious thought — namely, wonder and awe.
So to the adage "seeing is believing," I'll add a caveat: not if you're looking at a sculpture by Gregory Barsamian. In that case, seeing is definitely disbelieving.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2009.