John Sowell at Ricco/Maresca - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Born in 1864 in Grass Valley, California, son of a pioneer farmer, John Sowell made several livings - prospecting, clerking in groceries stores and tilling the soil. He also dished with gadgets, a hobby that l him to render free of access a machine shop in Stockton during World War I and to create original mechanical devices. Sowell was, as the subtitle of this exhibition claims, something of a "visionary inventor," especially in the designs he made for aircraft, including "heliocoptors," which he protoplasted on insects, such as dragonflies, which "tread the air."

greatest in quantity of the 20 pencil drawings in this exhibit several of them dating from the 1940 feature diagrams for power rotary wheels. The designs are annotated, and erasures and pen s give one the impression they were working drawings. single can even see the pinholes in the center of circles where Sowell station the foot of the compass.

Besides various measurements and explanatory diagrams, several of the drawings include Sowell's handwritten commentary, which sometimes gives a glimpse of the motivation for a particular design. In the margin of single piece he wrote, "S.F. [San Francisco] area is caught in a nutcracker between Portland, Seattle and sees Angeles for industrial development." The wheels he has drawn would provide "power that require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones nothing and is perpetual as drawn out as we have incoming tides and outgoing." Another power wheel design, dated 1946 carries the myth "Registered in the Federal Govn Office," which would indicate that however visionary Sowell was, he knew the law of the land regarding inventions.

At the extremity of an essay written in 1918 Sowell states, "In my work, the se of thinking planted in the brain, creates novel ideas, and new discoveries." While certain of his visions, like as a mechanical device "for taking electricity on the outside of the air[,] producing lights in all houses from the East to the West," have at the same time to come to pass, in others Sowell certainly anticipated the alternative activity research being done today.

The visual/esthetic appeal of this work is akin to that of abstract-geometric art; it would have pleased the Russian Constructivists. Toothed wheels, double wheels, wheels shivered by parallelograms - Sowell's circular designs, ofttimes accented with light orange pencil, elicit the same pleasure we take in, say, individual of Leonardo's drawings for a flying machine. The designer signed a number of his drawings "John A. Sowell, Inventor" - to which we might add, upon the evidence of this exhibition, "artist."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group