Campus Life

Texas A&M Professor’s Multisensory Interactive Solo Exhibition Debuts In Houston

January 29, 2018

Sherman Finch's art show
Sherman Finch stands with his interactive art.
By Sarah Wilson, Texas A&M University College of Architecture

An interactive art exhibit featuring sonic sculptures, kinetic assemblages and mechanized drawings created by Sherman Finch, assistant professor of visualization at Texas A&M University, is on display through Saturday, March 10, at Art League Houston.

The show, “Perceptual Perpetual,” relies on audience participation to activate the visual system, creating variations in how the conceptual work is experienced.

“It’s kind of a physics machine,” Finch said. “Similar to the anatomy of a pachinko game or children’s handheld spinner toy, where gravity, kinetics and a variety of other forces cause surfaces to spin and set objects in motion. Each piece offers a unique interactive framework that creates random fluctuations in movement and audio mechanics. As the work is activated, a conversation emerges between visual aesthetics and embodied interaction.”

The result is a playful art experience celebrating creativity and human ingenuity.

Sherman Finch's art show
Art from Sherman Finch’s solo exhibit.

“The exhibition presents a nexus between art and science that recalls such sources as Galileo’s astronomical instruments, Leonardo da Vinci’s diagrams on perpetual motion, John Cage’s artistic philosophy of chance, and Jean Tinguely’s concept of meta-mechanics,” Finch said.

Finch, who has a bachelor’s degree in art from the Rhode Island School of Design and two master’s degrees from the Maryland Institute, is a hybrid artist who works in traditional, digital and multi-media forms, with a special emphasis in the area of creative interaction, kinetic assemblage, sonification and conceptual art.

His work has been exhibited, performed and screened at venues such as the Roswell Museum and Art Center, the Amarillo Museum of Art, the Artscape in Baltimore, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Governor’s Island Art Fair, Alexandria Museum of Art, Art Interactive Gallery Boston, Sarai Media Lab in New Delhi, New Museum of Art Detroit and York Art Gallery UK, among other places.

He is included in the publication Future Now: 100 Contemporary Artists, produced by Aesthetica, a British art and culture magazine. Recently, Finch’s work was featured on a billboard in Los Angeles as part of the 2016 Billboard Creative Public Art Project and was an official selection of the 2017 London Experimental Film Festival. He is a founding member of the collaborative group, The AKA Collective.

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Media contact: Sarah Wilson, architecture communications specialist, at 979-862-6642 or swilson@arch.tamu.edu; or Elena Watts, marketing and communications specialist, at 979-458-8412 or elenaw@tamu.edu

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