Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is extremely pleased to present Time Pieces, an exhibition of new electronic sculptures by Alan Rath.
On view will be seven recent works continuing Alan Rath's exploration of mankind's fascination with time and technology. With a background in electrical engineering from MIT, Rath, custom designs every circuit built into his sculptures and hand solders each connection. Rath describes himself as being: "...obsessed with this whole idea of form, balance and composition; of simple lines and three dimensional relationships".
In Running Man Triptych (2005) and in Framed Running Man III (2005), ergonomically perfected human forms progress from a constant gate to a sprinters dash, each day, yielding a new speed, direction and hue.
The works presented in the exhibition are programmed with an internal calendar of up to fifty years, which controls the pace of the moving images and visual sequence, giving an organic and unpredictable feeling to each work.
Rath's sculptures have progressed beyond the appearance of dismembered figures out of a science fiction movie, and have approached the refined realm of moving pictures - reminiscent of the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Rath's new multi-colored LCD screens overtake the fiber-based medium. A uniformed framed devise houses the raw materials of the information age: circuit boards, memory chips, frame buffers and wire tubes.
Through his running men, Rath challenges our relationship to technologies. His idea of a contemporary man is not too far off from consumer culture of today - a generation of cell phone and Ipod users, strapped with hard drives to their necks, speeding towards the future.
Alan Rath was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1959. He has lived in Oakland, California since 1984 and since that time has exhibited widely in museum and exhibition spaces internationally. His works are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Hara Museum, Japan and other important institutions. His most recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Haines Gallery and the Carl Solway Gallery, San Francisco, California, and the Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, among others. His works have also been presented at the Museum of Art, San Jose, California, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Japan, the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany and others.