The San Francisco Zen Center has announced that they will present The Accidents of Our Materials with sculptors Arthur Ganson and Elizabeth King.
The presentation will explore the concepts of gesture, intention, and empathy as Ganson and King present their work and engage the audience in conversation. Using materials as varied as oil, concrete, and artichoke petals, Arthur Ganson explores existential conundrums with mechanized kinetic sculptures that mysteriously exhibit human qualities.
Elizabeth King combines movable figurative sculptures with stop-frame animation, blurring how we perceive what is real and what is virtual, imbuing the inanimate with an air of conscious intent. Ganson and King will be discussing the thematic similarities of their work, as well as engaging with the audience around notions of time, humanity, and consciousness for this fourth installment of The Expert’s Mind.
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.
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.
The event will take place Thursday, June 3 from 7:30pm – 9:30pm.