Artist's Talk

Caitlin Craven

Julee Holcombe

Photography

9 December 2019

Artist Talk Reflection

This past week I attended an artist talk done by Arthur Ganson, a kinetic sculptor who creates gears and moving art out of wire. Ganson‘s love for creating art first came from when he who on the edges of books in school. He would draw a little car moving further and further on each page of a book and flip through the pages, animating a car chase. As he got older, he then began working with wire, creating gears, allowing his art to start moving. The videos he showed greatly reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine: a machine that completes a simple task in an indirect, complicated way. One of Ganson’s works reminded me of this greatly. He created a whole machine to move a wishbone across a table as if it was walking. 

Going into this lecture I had little prior knowledge to the medium he worked in. I went in expecting it to be a talk on a form of painting or photography, but instead spoke about how he worked with wire. I found it interesting how he had his own unique ways of creating gears and imagining what they could do. Overall, I found his talk interesting, but I couldn’t find many ways to connect it back to photography and the work I’ve done this semester. I think that if I had to connect it, I would say that both his work and the work done in photography involves finding new perspectives and ways to look at the world, however the mediums themselves a very different.