Tom Shannon “Nothing”
Show Room Gowanus
This event has ended.
SHOW ROOM presents Nothing by Tom Shannon. The new works in Nothing are accompanied by drawings, photographs, and paintings from the 1970s, illustrating the scope of Shannon’s principle ideas.
Employing hidden mechanisms, magnets, and motion, Tom Shannon explores the ways of the natural world. While underlining the fundamental conditions of existence—such as gravity, weight, location, time—the works embody long study and share vast insight in a collection of deceptively simple motions as works levitate, turn, and pivot, shifting the viewer’s point of reference.
In Shannon’s Relativity Clock, a clock is rotated one revolution-per-minute counter-clockwise, thus canceling the one revolution-per-minute clockwise motion of the clock’s second hand. The hand moves through time but not through space. In Airfield, hundreds of red celluloid spheres are arranged in a crystal lattice, lit by ambient light and swayed by air currents. Aeros balances two aluminum forms in a magnetic pull.
On Nothing, Shannon writes:
The space around things, between things, under things has always played an important role in configuring my work. Space is breathing room but not empty, since air space is invisibly full of atoms, water vapor, microbes, electric charge, photons, magnetism, radiation, sound…
Even the perfect black vacuum of space between the stars, the largest feature of our existence, is not empty; it’s teeming with waves emitted by all the things. In the endless search through space for nothing, nothing has been found or not found. Not surprisingly, since nothing has, by definition, never been seen or sensed in anyway.
An artist and inventor, Tom Shannon holds several patents, and has experimented in painting, architecture, sculpture. In 1968, Pontus Hultén included Shannon’s work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. A year later Shannon was awarded first prize at the 72nd annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; P.S. 1, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Detroit Institute of Fine Art. He has been included in the biennials of Venice, Sao Paolo, and Lyon.
Media
Schedule
from May 09, 2013 to June 09, 2013
Closing Reception on 2013-06-09 from 13:00 to 15:00