A New Leaf Gallery, Sonoma will be presenting its Summer Show featuring a dozen Kinetic Sculptures by five artists. This show opens on Sunday June 22nd with a fabulous installation in the gallery, on the patios and in the gardens at Cornerstone Place, and runs through September.

Fascinating to watch, the kinetic sculptures in this exhibit evoke personal responses as varied as the artwork itself. The continual changes in wind-powered kinetics are mesmerizing in the garden, as they capture and give form to breezes that are also made visible by the leaves of nearby plants, yet using gleaming metals instead of foliage. These mesmerizing kinetic sculptures are wind driven or interactive and can be placed in the garden, at poolside, or even indoors.

Jeffery Laudenslager, whose work has been inspired by George Rickey’s masterful use of balance and his interest in nearly colliding elements, presents delicate, but powerful compositions that literally dance in the wind. His use of the extremely light-weight and resilient metal titanium helps him gain mobility in the slightest breezes and create completely unexpected motion.

John Tyler’s abstract tree-like sculptures in stainless steel and mild steel with a patina produce a captivating dance of unpredictable action, also presenting near-collisions of moving elements that challenge logic. Tyler, a former math teacher whose studio runs on solar electricity, is an avid surfer. He credits his intimate knowledge of sea currents for his understanding of wind, which obeys similar forces.

Moto Ohtake’s delicate stainless steel works reference the “anatomy of nature”, from tree leaves to planetary systems. “My life-long interest in the manifestations of nature on a micro and macroscopic level” has encouraged me to juxtapose cosmic symbolism with abstract interpretations of simple shapes found in nature”, says the artist.

Troy Pillow’s enchanting sculpture can be traced to a strong Calder influence, in both his mobiles and stabiles. The colorful geometric or organic shapes are rhythmically alive within formal frameworks in stainless steel, painted steel or bronze.

Phill Evans, who has been making kinetic sculptures in many different scales for over 30 years, presents the only figurative pieces in the exhibition. His whimsical bronze dancing figures are poised on curving bronze rods and Evans adds river rocks to the composition for fun and balance.

Any successful work of sculpture is a wonder of equilibrium, both physical and aesthetic, requiring prodigious design, fabrication and engineering skills and an intimate knowledge of technique, material, form and color. Kinetic sculptors interject extraordinary additional challenges when they add the fourth dimension of time to the three dimensions of static sculpture. They now need to design not one, but a dynamic flow of forms that continue to excite as they shift; they poetically choreograph the laws of physics while harnessing unpredictable natural phenomena like air or water currents.

Come join us in this beautiful garden setting amidst the vines at the gateway to the wine country in the Sonoma valley and be entranced by the motion!

Also enjoy our gallery collection of sculptural works from more than 60 different artists including, Jane Burton, Kathy Venter, Mike Moran, Nina Lyons, John Denning, Ben Bullock, Gale Hart, Jim Lloyd, Mark Oldland and more.

This show is in parallel to the prestigious exhibition “Sculpture in Motion”, an exhibit of 25 Kinetic Sculptures currently at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens curated by Brigitte Micmacker, co-owner of A New Leaf Gallery.