CLEARING
The Kinetic Sculpture of Marc Berghaus
April 11th - May 31st, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, April 11th 6 - 9pm
Artist Statement Clearing My artwork has always been concerned with causality-- how things happen, why they happen, and very importantly, why we think they happen. It is the human desire to find out why things happen that interests me the most. The uses of religion and science to explain causes, and the practices of ritual as well as the application of technology to influence events are what I have been studying for years now, and the works I produce are largely the results of this research. One of my primary artistic activities has long been to create mechanical representations of chance, to try to capture the incredibly complex non-linearity of the world around us using only very linear, 19th-century, Newtonian technology- brass gears, motors, hand-built crankshafts. I myself find that pretty funny. They are usually completely inadequate for their tasks, trying to contain or capture hopelessly complicated processes under little glass cases. This is both to question the appropriateness of containing and capturing Nature or chance, or trying to order our spirituality; and also to point out that people have always been compelled to try. It is a fascinating cycle of drive, attempt, failure, drive. This show is a nice representation of my work with causality over the last few years, with a variety of emphases between nature, randomness, spirituality and ritual. I call it Clearing first of all because I like presenting them here together, before I begin to shift my focus from perception of events to perception of environments. I also like the term as a sort of open site in which things are allowed to present themselves-- although, if you’ve read your Heidegger (and who hasn’t?) you’ll know that something becoming clearer will likely just make things even more obscured and confused. Sorry about that! -Marc Berghaus
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