Gary Justis’s sculptures are inspired by his lifelong immersion in the cause-and-effect operations of machinery. Employing a vocabulary of exposed mechanical fabrication—aluminum, steel, plastic, wood, and wire—along with eccentric kinetic elements such as motors, sound, and video, he finds metaphors for the complexity and imperfection of human action. Movement, even when only implied, remains central to his work, revealing beauty in repetitive gestures that mirror life’s irresolute choreography. In recent years, Justis’s fascination with light has led him to create sculptures and photographs that use light as both subject and medium.
Works such as The Pond (2013) and Sun Cell (2016), fabricated from a raw mechanical vocabulary of aluminum, steel, plastic, wood, and wire, move with eccentric kinetic rhythms, projecting motile images of light into the surrounding space. An arresting tension emerges between the hard, metallic, machine aesthetic of the objects and the soft, organic imagery of their light projections, which suggest natural phenomena such as water or a setting sun. Head On Horizon Redux (2010), the largest of Justis’s kinetic works, envelops the viewer in the beauty and dynamism of the object itself while simultaneously presenting projected imagery and the narrative of an overlaid looping video, created in collaboration with LJ Douglas, amid a cacophony of mechanical sound. Operatic in both scale and ambition, the work fully immerses the viewer in its multisensory experience.
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