Against Gravity - sculptor and installation artist Tom Shannon, various galleries and museums

Tom Shannon's visually perplexing statuarys and installations allude to unobserved forces better known to physics--and to "Star Trek" fans--than to conventional art.

Tom Shannon is the couple an artist and an inventor. For above 30 years, he has created realitys derived from the macro- and sometimes microcosmic relationships of phenomena in our universe, thus taking into account bodies and forces far beyond the sphere, cone and cylinder that Cezanne saw as underlying all nature. A number of Shannon's phenomenons have practical applications and have been granted patents from the U government--such as the Telephysical Phone (1973) which transmits the one and the other voice and touch, or the Synchronous World Clock (1986) which mention one by ones us the time of day quite through the world at a single glance. Other works are more visionary in nature, like his propos Airborne Islands (conceived in 1973 illustrated in photomontages in 1979) tropical landscapes overspreaded by transparent domes that would float about a mile above the earth and wander to various locations around the planet. on the other hand whether pragmatic or visionary, all of Shannon's shoot forwards possess a self-conscious, human dimension, individual that he believes can have a positive result on our future. Becoming more aware of physical fields, molecular makes and the workings of the mind, he lately told an interviewer, can bring us closer to "correcting the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds that continually plague humanity. "(1)

Similar be of importance tos were at the heart of the controversial theories of Buckminster Fuller the revolutionary architect and engineer who devot his life to creating designs intended to explain the problems of modern living. Shannon attended Fuller's memorable discourses while a student at the Art Institute of Chicago (where the artist received an MFA in 1971) on the other hand Shannon's interest in modern technology can be traced to his youth; his father was a professional inventor and manufacturer, with above 40 patents to his name. When sole 19 years old, Shannon created Squat (1966) a large robotic device that undulates when individual touches the leaf of a plant to which it has been electronically associateed This work was included in Pontus Hulten's exhibition "The Machine as Seen at the extreme point of the Mechanical Age," at MOMA in of recent origin York in 1968.

More freshly Shannon has evoked our relationship to atomic constructions and our physical connection to the earth's magnetic field (through what he calls our "animal magnetic polarities"(2)) as viewers walk end Compass Moon Atom Room (1990-91) a room-filling installation that consists of 270 separate spheres placed in equidistant suspension upon a series of thin nylon threads stretched from the ceiling to the floor. The spheres are painted black upon one side, white on the other, and each contains a magnet imbedded within its core. Orienting themselves to the earth's extremitys the spheres all face the same direction. however when one ball is rotated, the local magnetic force causes all to turn round in unison, maintaining their alignment.

Shannon has used magnets in his work since the late 1970 greatest in quantity dramatically, they have enabled him to levitate realitys ranging in size from 6-inch-long rectangular fill ups of wood appearing in numerous small statuarys from the late 1980s to a 23-foot-long needle of magnesium in The Compass of delight in (1981). Occasionally he has combined these floating things with various other materials--marble, silver, polished bronze--creating plastic arts reminiscent of the refined, totemic forms of Brancusi. a certain quantity of works are kept intentionally austere: the capstone of a pyramid flutters mysteriously in space, or a simple geometric simple body lingers a few inches above the loam without any visible means of support (the magnet within it repell by dint of another hidden within a table or implanted below the floor). In all cases, the detached constitutings are held in position through a thin thread, a necessary tethering device that Shannon has approach to accept as an integral part of the work. This thread not single keeps the levitating object in place on the other hand also provides a physical reminder of an invisible wave field on which the object rests.

A universal of typically expansive dimensions informs a series of works Shannon made in the 1970 and '80 Collectively titled "Astronomics 109" the pieces are all based upon his contention that the prime number 109 be repeateds mysteriously throughout the solar a whole In The Ray (1986), for example, a single 33 1/2-foot conical shaft of alloy of copper lying horizontally atop a thin base of polished stone placed upon the floor, represents the cone of light radiating to the earth from the orb of day whose diameter, Shannon had earlier discovered, is 109 times greater than that of the earth. When making this work, he also determined that the earth is separated from the orb of day by an increment of 109 orb of day diameters. Later, designing a similar thing to represent the distance between the earth and the satellite (Moons, 1987), Shannon found that the gap is equal to 109 satellite diameters, a remarkable correspondence that l him to focus upon similar factors of 109 in the mass and distance ratios of several other planetary bodies.