Despite the fact that sculptor Joel Hobbie uses discarded components from the Los Alamos National Laboratory—home of the Manhattan Project during World War II and the concurrent global race for nuclear arms—none of his art is radioactive, he assures visitors: He’s even had his workplace Geigered. Combining hard-edged, machined-from-scratch mechanism and machinery from the labs with his biomorphic, welded-metal forms and lighting them with electronically programmed LED fixtures, Hobbie’s art comes across as something that might pop up in a Star Wars bar scene, part sentient and part mechanized—a more pleasant incarnation of Darth Vader, say—an actual creature with its own systemic morphology.
Hobbie studied sculpture and metalworking at Western Michigan University, The University of Minnesota, and at Albuquerque’s TVI (now known as Central New Mexico Community College). He currently lives and works in Santa Fe, where he has the “world’s smallest machining and metal-working studio.” Somehow, though, he manages to crank out monumentally tall, machined and welded sculptures of light and metal. Alert Railyard denizens may recall that his solar-paneled, neon-lit sculpture was installed at Warehouse 21 when the organization moved into its brand new digs next door to SITE Santa Fe.
Lately, the neon aspect of his work has evolved into something more interactive and solar-powered. Inspiration comes to the artist from microbiological organisms and marine invertebrates, a permutation he terms “Industrial Organics.” His most recent work, the “Cell Division” series, involves heat sensors and computer programming. The results upend the usual linear viewer/artist dialectic, as the former transforms from passive spectator to active participant.
In one of Hobbie’s newest works, for example (all of his pieces are untitled), cupping one’s hands around two rather hard-to-find heat sensors cause symmetrically placed tri-color LEDs to change hues; eventually, when the lit spheres reach the color blue, precisely machined gears rotate. The artist fashions his sculptures so that interacting with them “is not very intuitive. You have to engage with the work. It takes thought and a certain attention span.”
These post-atomic sculptures require a certain shift in our understanding of art as an object to be observed; while they are not toys, these pieces do move and change colors, depending upon their environments, and sometimes it seems, their own directives. For Hobbie, “contemplating these reactions and interactions [of the works with viewers] has sparked many different ideas for future projects that could function on an even larger scale, and be able to include a small group of participants.”
Eileen Braziel Fine Art is open by appointment. Contact the gallery at
229 B Johnson Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87501
www.eileenbrazielfinearts.com
