Kurt Wold: Machinations
Kurt Wold is a dynamic artist whose kinetic installations referencing bicycles are used as a metaphor for life’s precariousness. His work reveals the artist’s depth of contemplation of both the physicality of the bike with its strong geometric compositions, its implied motion, and provocative memories of childhood use. The Girl’s bike series makes the point that the bicycle is the only gender specific means of transportation These ideas are the launching point for a more probing question that both he and Clayton Bailey share. What are the true parameters of art within and without the artificial affirmation gallery exhibitions too often provide.
Kurt Wold Some Of My Best Friends Are Unstable, 2009
Clayton Bailey’s installation of his humorous robots offers an opportunity to explore this idea further. His metal figures are made from select car and appliance parts, aluminum cookware and other finds from flea markets. To date his has made over 100 life-size sculptures that are figurative or beastly. Many are engineered to blink or make a sound prompted by the viewer. How unusual! Instead of standing back in restraint, some of Bailey’s sculptures are designed to stir proprietary confusion, establishing a sense of fun not usually seen in a serious gallery environment.
As a self-taught artist Betty Bailey’s color-pencil drawings document the creative life that she and Clayton have shared for fifty years. Exhibition openings and hot-tub gatherings are just some of the daily occasions one finds in her work. Many of those seen in her imagery are other Bay Area artists whose coterie of friendships, as rendered by the artist, captures an authentic perspective to the artful life.
Clayton and Betty Bailey:
Robots and Watercolors
Betty Bailey Installation Drawing, 2009
