Jacob Tonski, visiting AIMS faculty
LM PROJECTS
(formerly Bank Art)
Los Angeles CA
CAUSE & EFFECT
Nova Jiang
Len Lye
Robert Rauschenberg
Jacob Tonski
Peter Fischli &
David Weiss
Sep 05, 2009 – Nov 14, 2009
LM PROJECTS is please to announce its first exhibition, “Cause and Effect,” showcasing a collection of video based performances and kinetic sculpture from the mid 1960′s to the present. Though the discourse surrounding each of the selected works diverge from one another and their classification as kinetic art, they nonetheless are linked through their mechanical, temporal, and movement based components. Len Lye’s “Trilogy: A Flip and Two Twisters” serves as a point of departure for the rest of the exhibition as performance and theatrics commingle with art and engineering. Rauschenberg’s “Open Score” and emerging artist Jacob Tonski’s “Balance Study, Threshold” are performative works dependant on the action of participants, while Peter Fischli and David Weiss rely on the chain reactions of common place objects and combustibles in “The Way Things Go.”
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.
Tonski holds an MFA from the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. He studied computer science at Brown University and worked as a Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. He has lived in Berkeley, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Paris and Providence, grew up in West Virginia, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio.