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Leonardo 34.3 (2001) 179



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The Leonardo Gallery

Gregory Barsamian

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Gregory Barsamian's 3D animated sculptures probe some of the fundamental dilemmas of human existence while celebrating the potency of dreams. Employing the nineteenth-century theory of the persistence of vision, Barsamian creates kinetic sculptural pieces that meld and metamorphose familiar objects in unexpected ways to suggest cinematic alternative realities. Using rotating mechanical armatures and synchronized strobe lights, Barsamian's pieces transform simple animation into a boldly 3D sculptural illusion--one that is also a kind of magical realism.

Barsamian's early work was based on simple mechanics: His Dipping Digits (1991) is a tabletop sculpture composed of a round, primordial form with 16 sets of protruding arms and hands that dip into open but illegible books. As the hands literally scoop up the text, a lizard suddenly emerges from each book only to slip through the hands. Putti, another kinetic sculpture, questions the validity of human perception via the oddly disturbing phenomenon of flying cherubim that metamorphose into military helicopters and back again. This intriguing piece plays upon the tensions between opposites: love and war, beauty and austerity, imagination and reality. Barsamian's recent mechanistic works use a helical format to create more complex "stories" that emerge horizontally, vertically and diagonally. These works, such as Transfiguration and Two Step, draw on familiar elements from our collective past (a bird in flight, falling books, a torn photograph) to explore the repetition of human behaviors and the expressive and aggressive potential of human action. Like the mesmerizing Scream (shown here and Color Plate A No. 1, © Gregory Barsamian, 1998), these pieces engage and horrify, fusing the mundane and the disturbing and confounding our senses like a wayward dream come to life.

(Gregory Barsamian, 43 Grand Street, Brooklyn, NY 22122, U.S.A. E-mail: <Venial@concentric.net>.)

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